Description of problem: consolehelper appears to be hosing up MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1 authentication on ssh -X connected session, preventing normal remote use of system-config-users and similar programs. This is essentially similar to Fedora bug #239395, except that I have a system with the environment described there and cannot reproduce the problem there. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): Component is /usr/bin/consolehelper in at least the following package/release environments: usermode-1.74-1 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES release 4 (Nahant Update 4) usermode-1.68-5 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES release 3 (Taroon Update 3) usermode-1.63-1 Red Hat Linux release 8.0 (Psyche) Various Dell Poweredge servers and Optiplex desktops. The RHEL4 system is fully updated with up2date, including kernel packages. The problem does not occur in usermode-1.87-3 under Fedora Core release 6 (Zod) on a Dell Precision 530, also fully updated with yum. How reproducible: The problem appears to occur with any X-forwarding ssh program, including PuTTY under Windows. It appears to be limited to Python-based programs run via consolehelper, e.g. system-config-users exhibits the problem, system-config-printer does not. Running the wrapper script directly from the command line (/usr/share/system-config-users/system-config-users) does not exhibit the problem. Steps to Reproduce: 1. ssh -X <host> (or PuTTY with X11 Forwarding enabled) 2. Run system-config-users (or redhat-config-users on RH8, RHEL3) or any Python-based consolehelper-assisted program. Actual results: # system-config-users Xlib: connection to "localhost:10.0" refused by server Xlib: PuTTY X11 proxy: wrong authentication protocol attempted system-config-users requires a currently running X server. Expected results: system-config-users gui session on X-server. Additional info: The error messages delivered by ssh and PuTTY, the stderr of ssh -X -vvv, and reading of the ssh and PuTTY source code suggest that consolehelper is somehow munging up the MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1 authentication.
Errata: "Running the wrapper script directly from the command line (/usr/share/system-config-users/system-config-users) does not exhibit the problem." should be "Running the Python script directly from the command line (/usr/share/system-config-users/system-config-users.py) does not exhibit the problem."
Deferred to later Red Hat Linux Enterprise releases.