Re: How do you use su under X?
glhenni@cs.sandia.gov (Gary L. Hennigan) writes:
[snip]
| | Can anybody explain?
| [snip]
|
| Cookies are just random keys that are assigned to an X session (by
| xdm) when you log in. In order to display anything in that session you
| have to have that key.
|
| RedHat and SuSE probably don't enable their use. Under Debian you can
| disable them via the xdm configuration file in
| /etc/X11/xdm/xdm-config. If you wanted to turn them off you'd set
| DisplayManager._0.authorize to false.
|
| The reason the cookies exist is because X is pretty insecure without
| them. It's easy, for example, if you have "xhost + localhost" set for
| someone on localhost to capture you're keystrokes in any of your
| windows, or take snap shots of your screen.
Sorry to followup to my own post, but I should have mentioned that you
deal with cookies via the xauth command, e.g., to list the cookies you
have you can do
xauth list
Do a "man xauth" for further options.
Gary
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