Ubuntu

.Xauthority Help

Asked by Dr Denise M Noha

Can an expert help me undo with what I have done.

I followed the instructions give in http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-187899.html with regards to setting up firestarter automatically.

I now realise that firestarter is just a front end GUI and not really needed so I wanted to back out the changes as I could have reduced my security.

Changing the sudoers file back is easy but I also typed the following commands:

sudo ln -fs /home/USERNAME/.Xauthority /root/.Xauthority
sudo chown USERNAME.root /home/USERNAME/.Xauthority

How can I back these commands out to ensure that I have not reduced my security.

Help please from the experts out there.

Denise

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Andreas Simon
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Best Andreas Simon (andreas-w-simon) said : 		#1

These commands created a symbolic link from the user's .Xauthority file to /root/.Xauthority so that the root user and the user share the same .Xauthority file.
To remove this link again just do

sudo rm -f /root/.Xauthority

These .Xauthority files contain cookies which handle if the user is allowed to connect to a given X-Server or not. With the link you created you made sure that the firestarter GUI (which is probably run as root user) can always connect to the user's Xserver and thus can be displayed.

BTW, there is no (big) harm if you accidentally remove your user's .Xauthority file. If it's missing a new one will be automatically created when you log in under X/Gnome/KDE/etc again.

Cheers,
Andreas

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Andreas Simon (andreas-w-simon) said : 		#2

Oops, I've forgot something. The chown command also changed the ownership of the user's .Xauthority file.
To revert that do

chown USERNAME:USERNAME /home/USERNAME/.Xauthority

That changes the group from root back to USERNAME, which is the default for that file.

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Dr Denise M Noha (denise-noha) said : 		#3

Thanks Andreas Simon, that solved my question.