xauth for my wife over my xdm X-windows session?

[Jameson Burt <jameson@mnsinc.com>]

I leave my xdm X-windows session running 24 hours a day.
My wife uses Linux for a few minutes each day.
I could give her permissions to run X-windows applications on top of my 
X-windows session with
	xhost +localhost
but "xauth" is considered more secure and does not receive complaints from the 
exmh application.

It seems reasonable to me that anyone physically at my computer could run zher 
X-windows applications on top of my X-windows session.
Unfortunately, I see no way to easily do this or to give just my wife access, 
and have only come up with a kludge myself.  Since xdm creates a new entry in 
.Xauthority each time I login through the xdm X-manager, I can not make 
entries into other users' .Xauthority just one time, expecting that entry to 
work in the future.  Since .Xauthority does not provide read permission to 
other users, they can not get X-windows permissions from me and I can not give 
those permissions to them without becoming root.  The standard method to 
export permissions is designed for the same user on different computers; 
perhaps by giving "rsh" permissions through ~/.rhosts. This standard approach 
runs a script like the following, inappropriate for another user,
	xauth extract - $DISPLAY   |rsh otherhost2 xauth merge -
IS THERE A SLICK WAY TO GIVE MY WIFE OR ALL USERS PHYSICALLY AT MY COMPUTER, 
X-WINDOWS AUTHORIZATION TO RUN X-WINDOWS APPLICATIONS ON TOP OF MY X-WINDOWS 
SESSION?

Here is my kludge.

In .bashrc, a user gets the authorizations from zhe who started X-windows, 
        xowner=$(/bin/ps -auxw    |grep Xsession    |egrep -v 'sed|grep' \
               |sed 's/\([^ ]\) .*/\1/')
        if [ "$xowner" != "$USER" ]; then
                eval   xauth merge ~$xowner/.Xauthority
        fi

In .xsession, the starter of X-windows gives permissions for another user to 
read .Xauthority,
        chmod g+r ~/.Xauthority    #This line is unnecessary after first set.
        chgrp dialout ~/.Xauthority  #both my wife and I are in this group

-- 
Jim Burt, NJ9L,		Fairfax, Virginia, USA
jameson@mnsinc.com	http://www.mnsinc.com/jameson
jameson@pressroom.com

"It is not the shortcomings of others, nor what others have done or not
 done that one should think about, but what one has done or not done oneself."
--Dhammapada   ["dp" command for quotes from the Dhammapada, in Linux]



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