Sgi Xauthority Strangeness

[pauld () umbc edu (Paul Danckaert)]

I was poking around the xdm man page (under Irix 5.3) and found the 
following note, which I hadn't heard very much of before:

               Warning for SGI installations: With X authorization on,
               clients can still connect to the display using shm:0,
               even if they are not "authorized" to do so. As a
               workaround for this bug, you can disable the use of the
               shared memory transport, by adding the -shmnumclients 0
               option to the X invocation in
               /usr/lib/X11/xdm/Xservers (see the Xsgi man page).

I checked a few machines here, and sure enough, if you can log onto the 
machine, you can disable their xauthority and open the display.  Looking 
back at a 5.2 machine, it would appear to work fine there also.

Now, its nice to document it in the man page, but I've not heard this 
mentioned before, so I thought I would pass it along..


Paul Danckaert, Systems