Date: Mon, 17 Jun 2019 18:08:09 -0700 From: "Ronald F. Guilmette" <rfg@tristatelogic.com> To: freebsd-net <freebsd-net@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: localhost woes -- help requested Message-ID: <6376.1560820089@segfault.tristatelogic.com> In-Reply-To: <20190618003925.A49A1156E40C@mail.bitblocks.com>
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In message <20190618003925.A49A1156E40C@mail.bitblocks.com>,
Bakul Shah <bakul@bitblocks.com> wrote:
>> I really would like to understand why manual edits to /etc/hosts seem
>> to have no effect whatosoever.
That's issue/question #1.
>> And more importantly, I'd really still
>> like to know whey X applications cannot seem to connect to the X server
>> when and if DISPLAY is set to localhost:0.0 while they have no problem
>> doing so when DISPLAY is instead set to :0.0
This is issue/questuon #2.
>I ran into this as well. I tried tracing getent() through
>networking code in libc but this is quite a mess. And gdb
>doesn't work reliably either. No doubt there are some new
>switches I haven't explored. And threading.
Ok, I have an answer now on question #2. I asked some people who know
way more about X than I do (which is actually almost eerybody), and
as a result I found out the whole story.
It seems that at some point it time, somebody decided that it would be
Good if the default configuation(s) of the X server would no longer talk
to clients, by default, using TCP. (I can only assume that this was most
probably a very wise security improvement for the X server at the time.)
So anyway, the other thing I learned is that if one has a hostname... i.e.
*any* kind of a hostname... in one's DISPLAY environment variable value,
then X clients will all try to connect to the server using TCP. And that
will fail, as it should nowadays.
Apparenttly this even includes "localhost", which is sort of a special kind
of a hostname.
My problem was that... unbeknownst to me... I had the following line,
left over from ancient times, in one of my tcsh shell startup files:
setenv DISPLAY localhost:0.0
I simply removed that, quit X, logged out, and logged back in again,
and then started X again, and everything was perfect after that, most
probably because all of my processes (after starting X) were now inheriting
a proper and modern sort of value for DISPLAY, which is to say ":0".
That's all there was to it.
I'm still totally in the dark about Question #1 (above) however, but that
is just a matter of idle curiosity now, now that I have all of my X clients
working properly.
Regards,
rfg
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