Kate's Comment

Lately my personal Macbook Pro has started refusing to log in to my servers via SSH. I tried all sorts of things, removing my key, clearing hosts files, but to no avail. ssh -vvv showed this (some bits removed of course):

…
debug1: Authentication succeeded (publickey).
Authenticated to kateX.miniserver.com ([X.X.X.X]:22).
debug1: channel 0: new [client-session]
debug3: ssh_session2_open: channel_new: 0
debug2: channel 0: send open
debug1: Requesting no-more-sessions@openssh.com
debug1: Entering interactive session.
debug2: callback start
debug2: Checking for xauth using /opt/X11/bin/xauth -f /var/folders/61/97l_X/T//xauth_test exit > /dev/null 2> /dev/null

debug2: x11_get_proto: /opt/X11/bin/xauth -f /var/folders/61/X/T//ssh-X/xauthfile generate
/private/tmp/com.apple.launchd.X/org.macosforge.xquartz:0 MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1 untrusted timeout 1260 2>/dev/null

It looked like a problem with X11 forwarding, but I wasn’t trying to forward my X11 connection which threw me at first, but sure enough by disabling X11 forwarding with -x I am now able to log into my servers, like so:

ssh -x root@kateX.miniserver.com

I tried editing /etc/config/ssh_config and uncommenting “ForwardX11 no” but that didn’t help either; I still had to use the -x option. Likewise, clearing ~/.Xauthority had no effect.

If anyone has a suggestion as to how to force SSH to not attempt a X11 connection by default, please leave a comment!