Bug 334382 - Invalid ~/.Xauthority file prevents running root applications such as YaST
Summary: Invalid ~/.Xauthority file prevents running root applications such as YaST
Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX
: 223341 (view as bug list)
Alias: None
Product: openSUSE 10.3
Classification: openSUSE
Component: X11 Applications (show other bugs)
Version: Final
Hardware: i686 openSUSE 10.3
: P4 - Low : Normal (vote)
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Hans Petter Jansson
QA Contact: E-mail List
URL:
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2007-10-16 19:52 UTC by Michael Hutchinson
Modified: 2010-08-19 15:04 UTC (History)
2 users (show)

See Also:
Found By: ---
Services Priority:
Business Priority:
Blocker: ---
Marketing QA Status: ---
IT Deployment: ---

Attachments
the bad ~/.Xauthority file (121 bytes, application/octet-stream)
2007-10-16 19:54 UTC, Michael Hutchinson 		Details
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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.