Bug 334382

Summary:	Invalid ~/.Xauthority file prevents running root applications such as YaST
Product:	[openSUSE] openSUSE 10.3	Reporter:	Michael Hutchinson <mhutchinson>
Component:	X11 Applications	Assignee:	Hans Petter Jansson <hpj>
Status:	RESOLVED WONTFIX	QA Contact:	E-mail List <qa-bugs>
Severity:	Normal
Priority:	P4 - Low	CC:	bryce2, philippniehues
Version:	Final
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	i686
OS:	openSUSE 10.3
Whiteboard:
Found By:	---	Services Priority:
Business Priority:		Blocker:	---
Marketing QA Status:	---	IT Deployment:	---
Attachments:	the bad ~/.Xauthority file

Description Michael Hutchinson 2007-10-16 19:52:48 UTC

[This bug is not consistently reproducible]

It appears to be possible for the ~/.Xauthority to to get into a state that prevents accessing X from root. This prevents running admin apps such as YaST, with errors such as the following:
Invalid MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1 key
(y2controlcenter-gnome:18198): Gtk-WARNING **: cannot open display:

This has happened to me once -- however, the problem with GUI root commands not doing anything after the gnomesu password entry has happened in several sessions,  though I did not investigate it at the time. Removing ~/.Xauthority and restarting X fixed the problem.

The invalid ~/.Xauthority file is attached.

Note: I'm not running xgl, and I'm using auto-login.

Comment 1 Michael Hutchinson 2007-10-16 19:54:30 UTC

Created attachment 178848 [details]
the bad ~/.Xauthority file

Comment 2 Hans Petter Jansson 2007-10-17 07:13:35 UTC

User reports not having run any KDE applications either. I'm keeping an eye on this in case there are more reports, or we find out how the cookie file got into a bad state.

Comment 3 Michael Hutchinson 2007-10-17 14:08:40 UTC

It happened again after reboot (and auto-login).

Comment 4 Hans Petter Jansson 2007-10-17 21:09:21 UTC

I'm going to try and reproduce this bug using auto-login.

Comment 5 Michael Hutchinson 2007-11-11 18:02:14 UTC

I've run into this bug  on another machine without auto-login. Also a clean install, but with home directory mostly copied from the machine this bug first happened on.

N.B. the problem only happened once so far on this machine; it's been working fine most of the time.

Comment 6 JP Rosevear 2007-11-22 10:47:53 UTC

*** Bug 223341 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 7 Michael Hutchinson 2007-12-05 16:54:15 UTC

I don't know if this is related, but I've just had another similar error preventing me from running GUI apps as root:

No protocol specified

(y2controlcenter-gnome:5631): Gtk-WARNING **: cannot open display:

Either I'm incredibly unlucky, or this is a severe bug.

Comment 8 Philipp Niehues 2008-05-11 18:20:50 UTC

I am pretty sure to have the same bug:

After installing my system (+Gnome) I updated it (in Gnome with the applet). After that I was no longer available to access yast2 or any other application via gnomesu.

After finding this bugreport I tried to rename this Xauthority file, restarted X and now it works fine again.

Bye

Comment 9 Hans Petter Jansson 2008-08-09 03:23:13 UTC

Has anyone seen this in openSUSE 11.0 or newer?

Comment 10 Michael Hutchinson 2008-08-23 00:31:43 UTC

No, I haven't seen this since, but that may be because I haven't used auto-login since the second time this happened...

Comment 11 JP Rosevear 2010-08-19 15:04:13 UTC

Closing - no dupes on maintained products.