Date: Tue, 12 Oct 2004 14:53:25 -0400 From: Chuck Swiger <cswiger@mac.com> To: Robert Watson <rwatson@freebsd.org> Cc: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Subject: Re: startx xauth errors Message-ID: <416C2825.7090600@mac.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.NEB.3.96L.1041012045100.55701H-100000@fledge.watson.org> References: <Pine.NEB.3.96L.1041012045100.55701H-100000@fledge.watson.org>
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Robert Watson wrote: > On Mon, 11 Oct 2004, Doug White wrote: >>Make sure your machine can resolve its own hostname. THere's a couple >>of name lookups in the xauth path and it'll spit this out if the lookup >>fails. Make sure the system's hostname is fully qualified and listed in >>/etc/hosts, DNS, or both :) > > And/or use the neat trick of using 'localhost' as your hostname, which I > believe Apple uses at times. Oh, yes. Being able to talk to localhost is somewhere between a running joke and a sanity check back from the NeXT days. BSD-derived kernels can actually live without INET, but Mach and nmserver (the Mach network message server) depending on being able to address machines "by name" in order to do IPC. And at the user level, NEXTSTEP and MacOS X depended on a distributed model like NetInfo or now LDAP for accessing passwd, group, and other "directory services" information, looking on the local machine for ./localhost:local.nidb. If NetInfo couldn't talk to localhost, generally nobody could login to the system except root...unless the admin made a conscious effort to keep the backup /etc/passwd flat-file synced. No IPC and effectively single-user-mode access restrictions makes "talking to localhost" important. :-) Also, FWIW, Apple treats the DNS domain of "local" (as in, a FQDN of "localhost.local") in a special fashion for Rendezvous. -- -Chuck
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