Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 132979
exporting DISPLAY via hostname fails
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:07:04 EST
from customer: Here is what we are seeing on RedHat 64bit 3.0 (update 2 and update 3) We can set our DISPLAY variable to an IP address and we can get the X display back from the server. But when we set the DISPLAY to use our hostname, we cannot get x display. We do not see any DNS problem issue - forward and reverse lookups work. Our hostnames start with numeric and then followed by alphabets, e.g., 50dhcp24 where the first 2 digits represent the subnet. If we change our DNS naming to start with alpha (e.g., dhcp50) the X Display works fine. It is difficult to undertake this type of change as this requires management approval. This problem is not occurring on RH 3.0 32 bit (or older versions), Solaris and HPs. This problem can be replicated easily.
Does this problem only occur if the hostname is changed while the X server is running, or does it also occur if you do a full system reboot, in which the machine's hostname gets assigned via DHCP on system startup, prior to the X server starting? Thanks in advance. Setting problem status to "NEEDINFO".
from customer: The problem seems to be how the X server resolves the client hostname, in this case our PCs with DHCP assigned addresses. This problem occurs everytime the client hostname starts with a number. If I define my pc's address (to start with an alphabet) in the /etc/hosts file and make the corresponding change in the /etc/nsswitch.conf (to override DNS name resolution and use local file), the display works. I get a display back if I set my client PC (runningThe DISPLAY variable to an IP address. It does not seem to be a problem with the DNS, we can do forward and reverse lookups without any problems. The problem is always reproducible. I went and checked RH's bugzilla all day yesterday but did not find anything close to what we are seeing here. This is kind of holding us back in rolling-out our 64-bit machines with update 3 patches.
any update?
Bug #134883 appears to be the same issue, along with: https://freedesktop.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=1605
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 134883 ***