Lewis' Blog Tales from the trenches of information technology

Resolving remote X sessions via VNC under openSUSE 11

Why isn't anything as easy as it should be?

I just set up a new router for a client on a Sputnik-managed network, and created the proper network rule in the Sputnik Central Control server to direct port 5901 traffic through to the management workstation, which runs openSUSE 11.3. Sounds simple enough, right?

The connection went through with no problem, and I got my familiar login screen. Upon entering my credentials, the session immediately shut down. I tried all sorts of different window manager options, all to no avail.

Finally, I hit on this little gem, mentioning commenting out the IPv6 loopback reference in the hosts file. Luckily, via ssh, I was able to get into the box and make that tweak:

Original:

# special IPv6 addresses
::1 localhost ipv6-localhost ipv6-loopback

Changed:

# special IPv6 addresses
#::1 localhost ipv6-localhost ipv6-loopback

Voilà!

Now, why was that broken in the first place by the presence of the IPv6 loopback reference (IPv6 is turned off in the box), and further, why wasn't that fixed (you mean the original poster of the above forum comment and I are the only two people to have ever seen this, and as neither of us reported it, the bug hasn't been addressed?) between 11.1 and 11.3?

Last Updated on May 22nd, 2013 by LewisR