July 6, 2016 Less than a 1 minute read

Redirect xWindow display

Some times we haven’t access with root user directly to a server and we need execute su – to scale up to root. When we do we lose X connection but we can perform the following steps to run applications XWindow:

1.- Connect to server and list enviroment variables and xauth

Connecting to 172.1.195.38:22…

Connection established.

To escape to local shell, press ‘Ctrl+Alt+]’.

Last login: Mon May 23 11:22:22 2016 from 10.152.214.37

johnd@JohnD-Server1:~> echo $DISPLAY

localhost:10.0

johnd@JohnD-Server1:~> xauth list $DISPLAY

JohnD-Server1/unix:10 MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1 70a56a2cb6e8d74cfefc29c1b6186efb

2.- Change to root user:

johnd@JohnD-Server1:~> sudo su –

3.- Set the variable and xauth

JohnD-Server1:~ # export DISPLAY=localhost:10.0

JohnD-Server1:~ # xauth add JohnD-Server1/unix:10 MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1 70a56a2cb6e8d74cfefc29c1b6186efb

Enjoy it

Juan de la Cruz Arellano Royo

2 Comments

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Nelis Lamprecht

July 7, 2016 at 8:43 am

Just a tip for the above post. You can also use the following command as root to add the "magic cookie" from a X user:

xauth merge ~user/.Xauthority

Less work 😉

Regards,

Nelis

Juan de la Cruz Arellano Royo

Blog Post Author

July 7, 2016 at 10:01 am

Thank you very much for your reply

Regards

Juan de la Cruz Arellano Royo

Redirect xWindow display

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