Fedora 20 FirewallD GUI not working on X11 forwarding

I am having a problem with SSH X11 forwarding on Fedora 20 with firewall-config, the GUI tool for FirewallD (the dynamic firewall system). With most X11 GUI applications including pretty much all "system-config-*" programs, I am able to tunnel X11 windows just fine when calling SSH with "ssh -X" / "ssh -Y". However, when I run "firewall-config" from the SSH session, I get a window with no contents in it. The window has the title "Firewall Configuration" and the correct icon, but the whole content of the window is grey. It also hangs in such a way that I can't close the window or end the program with CTRL-C; I seem to have to do CTRL-Z and then a kill % command.

Is this a bug in the program? Is it possible that only certain programs using X11 are incompatible with forwarding? Will I be restricted to only using the command-line tool over SSH?

user553702

Posted 2014-01-11T09:27:03.030

Reputation: 1 081

Answers

Try as follows

  xhost + 
  sudo firewall-config....

If this works, and you wish to make it permanent, edit as sudo the file /root/.bashrc and add the line:

 export XAUTHORITY=/home/yourname/.Xauthority

Source the file, and you are good to go.

MariusMatutiae

Posted 2014-01-11T09:27:03.030

Reputation: 41 321

Sorry but calling xhost + before the command doesn't solve the problem. – user553702 – 2014-01-11T10:40:00.197

@user553702 Then please, after it freezes, do dmesg | tail -n 20 and post the output here, if you can see something concerning this incident. – MariusMatutiae – 2014-01-11T11:15:46.070

startx script needs fixing. XAUTHORITY setup, There's a very simple fix: Edit /usr/bin/startx (as root, of course) and change the line:

xserverauthfile=$HOME/.serverauth.$$

to read instead

xserverauthfile=$XAUTHORITY

Stephen Sullivan

Posted 2014-01-11T09:27:03.030

Reputation: 11