One for the X forwarding geeks

[lethargic_man]

Here's a little problem I have at work. My normal operating environment there is Cygwin running X-Window. From time to time I open a terminal on another machine using (an menu option bound to) xterm -e 'ssh -X <hostname>'. For several minutes X forwarding works nicely, but then any attempt to open a new window from the remote machine results in "Can't connect to X11 window server using 'localhost:10.0' as the value of the DISPLAY variable." Existing windows opened from the remote machine are unaffected, and new windows can still be opened from a new SSH session, so the problem is workable round, but it's annoying.

Has anyone here come across anything like this before?

Comments

[simont]

[Dropping in via my network page; hello, we both know liv]

I heard recently that up-to-date versions of the OpenSSH client default to timing out X forwarding after twenty minutes, so that no further X connections made to the forwarded port are propagated back to the real X server. You might try ssh -o "ForwardX11Timeout 24h" or something like that, and see if it makes a difference.

[lethargic_man]

That did the job nicely—thanks!