In article <9602080926.AA02711@cs.few.eur.nl> pk@cs.few.eur.nl (Paul Kranenburg) writes:
>> I've noticed that the X11R6 I compiled for my Sparc running NetBSD-1.1
>> has some problems with .Xauthority. Very often it doesn't seem to be able
>> to read it, for no reason. Using xauth to read it works, and right after using
>> xauth, the problem disappears (for some time):
>
>Your .Xauthority is not world-readable, and xterm is dumb enough to try and
>read it with its setuid-bit in effect. This will (usually) fail on a NFS
>mounted filesystem. Unless all of the file bits are in the local machine's
>cache, in which case there won't be a NFS read call to the server. Note that,
>on NFS filesystems, it is the read call (not open(2)) that returns
>"Permission denied" (esp. for processes running as root).

PK is absolutely right. I would suggest that you compile and run XFree86 on
the sparc [although this is a bit counter-intuitive :-)], since I have fixed
that bug in xterm and the fix (together with a *lot* of others) is in the
standard XFree86 release.

christos