From owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Tue Oct 12 18:53:58 2004 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id BC59516A4CE; Tue, 12 Oct 2004 18:53:58 +0000 (GMT) Received: from pi.codefab.com (pi.codefab.com [199.103.21.227]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5EA8A43D49; Tue, 12 Oct 2004 18:53:58 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from cswiger@mac.com) Received: from [192.168.1.3] (pool-68-160-246-51.ny325.east.verizon.net [68.160.246.51]) by pi.codefab.com (8.12.11/8.12.11) with ESMTP id i9CIrpOV061328 (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA bits=256 verify=NO); Tue, 12 Oct 2004 14:53:54 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: <416C2825.7090600@mac.com> Date: Tue, 12 Oct 2004 14:53:25 -0400 From: Chuck Swiger Organization: The Courts of Chaos User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040910 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Robert Watson References: In-Reply-To: X-Enigmail-Version: 0.86.1.0 X-Enigmail-Supports: pgp-inline, pgp-mime Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Spam-Status: No, hits=0.0 required=5.5 tests=none autolearn=no version=2.63 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.63 (2004-01-11) on pi.codefab.com cc: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Subject: Re: startx xauth errors X-BeenThere: freebsd-current@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: Discussions about the use of FreeBSD-current List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Tue, 12 Oct 2004 18:53:58 -0000 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