From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.77 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.4.7 i686) Description of problem: When logging on to a remote machine which doesn't have X Windows installed, the following error message appears: sh: /usr/X11R6/bin/xauth: No such file or directory while it should probably just silently skip this step since X is not installed. RPM: openssh-2.9p2-3 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Use OpenSSH to log on to a remote machine that doesn't have X 2. 3. Actual Results: sh: /usr/X11R6/bin/xauth: No such file or directory Expected Results: Should silently ignore xauth? Additional info:
This is not ssh problem per se. It is a pam problem (pam_xauth module) -- it should not call xauth if there is no such program installed. But. It is a bug in XFree packages: xauth must be in XFree-libs, not in XFree. Reason is that many programs (e.g. emacs, xterm etc) doesn't need to have local x server, but needs xlib and xauth (and some more control programs) to operate. xlib iteslf is available, but xauth is only in xserver package. So I think this bug should be redirected to xfree package... BTW, it may be a good idea to include another subpackage for xfree, e.g. xfree-basic-tools, if xauth&co doesn't belongs to xlibs.
sshd doesn't use pam_xauth -- it's actually trying to run xauth as part of the process of setting up a session for the user. Anyhow, this bug should be fixed again as of 2.9p2-7 and later. Thanks!
I've just split out xauth into a separate subpackage of XFree86 for now called XFree86-xauth, and it should appear in rawhide within the next week.