Re: Gnome (gdm) no longer working on update to pkgsrc-2008q4

["Steven M. Bellovin" <smb%cs.columbia.edu@localhost>]

On Sun, 01 Feb 2009 10:43:11 -0000
"David Lord" <netbsd%lordynet.org@localhost> wrote:

> Putting the above "X: client 1 rejected from local host (uid 0)"
> in google finds a hit for "nv driver and gnome broken" related to 
> fedora.
> 
That strikes me as improbable.  I understand the immediate cause of the
problem, but not why it's triggered here.  Furthermore, I don't have
any Gnome machines I can experiment on.

Briefly, clients -- in this case, probably gdm itself -- connecting to
an X server have to authenticate themselves.  That can be done in a
variety of ways; most likely here, it's using "magic cookie"
authentication.  That in turn is generally set up by the xauth
command.  I suspect that the change is that this form of authentication
is now required, but for some reason isn't being set up properly, but
just why this should be the case is unclear to me.  (Video drivers are
back-ends to the X server; the authentication happens earlier.)

One possible thought: has /etc/rc.d/gdm changed, and if so have you
installed the new one?  My suspicion is that something needs to happen
there, but I don't know what.

                --Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb