
Of course I would like the longest possible timeout setting, so I started with very long times, like 10000 weeks.
#XQUARTZ NOT RESPONDING MAC OS X#
Override the Timeout Default (and avoid a Mac OS X bug)Įven though the Mac’s man pages don’t list ForwardX11Timeout as a parameter, adding it to /etc/ssh_config does not cause an unrecognized option error, so it’s a legal option.
#XQUARTZ NOT RESPONDING FULL#
It comes into play only for untrusted connections, apparently, but I don’t have a full trust authority system set up since I only do this locally.

In that context, the default value of the timeout parameter is 20 minutes. A few postings about this parameter are in the context of the Cygwin X server, but the symptoms reported are the same as what I saw. Even the Mac OS X’s ssh_config or ssh man page do not even list ForwardX11Timeout as a parameter. Web searches for “ForwardX11Timeout” don’t help much there is very little information about it. So there is apparently a timeout for forwarding X11 display over SSH. Follow the same steps and at the time it fails to start a new xterm it will report: Rejected X11 connection after ForwardX11Timeout expired It’s an X11 Forwarding Timeout It fails with the message “xterm Xt error: Can’t open display: localhost:10.0”Īfter spending a few hours on this, the debug step that led me to the solution was to invoke ssh from the Mac with the highest level of debug logging: “ssh -vvv -X ”.

In keeping with the purpose of this blog, I’m writing this up because it took a bit of effort to solve, and I found virtually no useful information about it on web searches. That’s what happened to me recently and through some debugging I found the solution, which I’ll get to in a minute. X11 Display Forwarding Fails After Some TimeĪre you finding that an ssh session works fine to log in to a remote system and forward the display back to your local machine, but after a while stops being able to start new X11 applications? Specifically, the X11 display forwarding fails after some time, resulting in no usable display for the X11 application.
