X forwarding through SSH in HP-UX

20080828 13:30 by javier

If you try to do X forwarding by SSHing to an HP-UX host, you may get the dreaded “Can’t get IP address for X11 DISPLAY.” error. This is more common than you might think, and the reason is that an out-of-the box installation of HP-UX has four or five /etc/nsswitch.conf *examples* for you to install, but not an actual /etc/nsswitch.conf file. I guess this is buried somewhere on the documentation — hey, it might even be a FAQ, but I guess that shipping with a reasonable default wouldn’t hurt.
Well anyway, the following minimal /etc/nsswitch.conf should do for the vast majority of scenarios I can imagine:

# echo “hosts: files dns” > /etc/nsswitch.conf

Now SSH X forwarding should work and a myriad other disasters waiting to happen will surely be averted.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 28th, 2008 at 13:30 and is filed under General, SysAdmin. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.