KB 395

X Forwarding not working right with FreeBSD

Article:395
Created:2005-04-19 13:47:40
Categories:
  SSH
  FreeBSD

Question or Symptom

I just set up a new FreeBSD desktop machine and X forwarding does not always work.

Resolution

"ssh -X" enables X forwarding on an SSH session. I recently installed a FreeBSD 5.3 system, and my forwarded X sessions weren't working quite right. Some applications worked OK (like xterm) but others (like some Perl/Tk apps) would give this error:

X Error of failed request:  BadAtom (invalid Atom parameter)
 Major opcode of failed request:  20 (X_GetProperty)
 Atom id in failed request:  0x157
 Serial number of failed request:  11
 Current serial number in output stream:  11
 

The fix is to use "ssh -X -Y" to enable Trusted X11 forwarding. Or, you can set "ForwardX11Trusted yes" in /etc/ssh/ssh_config to affect all ssh client sessions on your host.