Sporadic '.Xauthority not writable, changes will be ignored' going from OSX -> Linux

Posted by Kamil Kisiel on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Kamil Kisiel
Published on 2010-03-29T17:30:10Z Indexed on 2010/03/29 17:33 UTC
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Filed under:

linux

|

x11

|

macosx

Every now and then when users SSH from their OS X (Snow Leopard) workstation to one of our Linux hosts they receive the message:

/usr/bin/xauth: ~/.Xauthority not writable, changes will be ignored

Of course, their X forwarded applications will not work at this point.

However, if they log out and log right back in again they do not get the message and everything works as expected.

On their Mac they get their home directory via AFP. The Linux machines get it via NFS.

Any ideas on what could be going on here?

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