Originally posted by vsurfer:
AFAIK I haven't set up ssh authentication on this box -- anyone know what is the purpose of the file Xauthority in my home folder?
The $HOME/.Xauthority file is for storing X session cookies. Basically it makes it difficult to hijack someones remote X session with the server. See man Xsecurity and man xauth for more details.
When you log in via ssh to a machine that has X windows installed you can run X based applications on the remote machine and have them display locally on the client. For this to work you also need to have ForwardX11 set to yes on the remote host side in the /etc/ssh/ssh_config file (or wherever it is set on your system). This can be overridden with commandline options.
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