X11 connection rejected because of wrong authentication

If you ssh to a host with X11 authentication turned on and then try to execute an X application and you get the message

X11 connection rejected because of wrong authentication

...it may be a bizarre side effect of your disks being full. I had this problem on a Solaris 8 system. I ssh'd to it with X11 forwarding, and then ran an X application. This had worked fine before. This time I got the above message. After much wasted time, I discovered that /usr was full. This apparently caused ssh to be unable to write my ~/.Xauthority file, which caused the problem. I cleaned up /usr and the problem went away.

Pete Siemsen

Last modified: Mon Apr 12 11:03:19 MDT 2004