SUMMARY: xhost/openwin refuses connection

From: Patrick L. Nolan (pln@egret1.Stanford.EDU)
Date: Thu Aug 13 1992 - 19:33:40 CDT


Yesterday I posted a question about some strange behavior by xhost.
The first reply came within a couple of hours, and it seems to be
correct.

Thanks to those who have replied so far:
fwp@CC.MsState.Edu (Frank Peters)
cyerkes@jpmorgan.com
birger@vest.sdata.no
geertj@ica.philips.nl
edguer@alpha.CES.CWRU.Edu
danielle@systems.caltech.edu (Danielle Sanine)

The answer is that every host in the DNS database should have two
records, an A record to allow name-->address lookups and a PTR
record to allow address-->name lookups. Xhost uses both of these.
The particular remote host I was trying to access only had the A
record. This problem will have to be solved by the network
administrators at the remote site, and they have been notified.

Original posting:
-------------------------------------------------------------------

I just ran into a strange problem. A user was trying to run
Xview clients (cmdtool, mailtool) on a remote Sun and display
them on a local OpenWin server. The connection would be
refused each time. We moved to another workstation and switched
from OW 2.0 to 3.0 with no improvement. Trying similar operations
with a different remote host worked OK. I finally traced the
difference to the way xhost treated the remote host.
When I issued the command 'xhost pulsar.hsc.edu', it would
reply in the usual way 'pulsar.hsc.edu being added to access
control list'. But when I ran xhost to see the list,
the host would appear in the form of a numerical IP address,
rather than by name. This doesn't happen for any other
host I've tried. Nslookup finds this host with no apparent
problem.

The workaround is to add this host to /etc/hosts on the NIS
server and rebuild the maps. I would like to know what's going
on, though.

The setup: SunOS 4.1.1, Sparkstation IPC and 1+, Openwin 2 and
3 on this end, Openwin 2 on the other end, name resolution by
NIS (with DNS enabled in the Makefile).

* Patrick L. Nolan (415)723-0133 *
* W. W. Hansen Experimental Physics Laboratory (HEPL) *
* Stanford University *
* Bitnet: PLN@SLACVM Internet: pln@egret1.stanford.edu *



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