xdm and chooser woes

[Kevin Oberman]

On Thu, May 26, 2016 at 3:09 AM, Gerrit Kühn <gerrit.kuehn at aei.mpg.de>
wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I have a very old-school indirect xdm/chooser list for a couple of
> machines (Linux and FreeBSD). This works fine with the chooser running on
> a Linux box. The chooser on a FreeBSD box comes up with the chooser list,
> but after selection I do not get a login window. Instead, I get the message
> "Cannot connect to xdm" in xdm.log and after some blinking and flashing
> of the screen I get the chooser back. This behaviour is always the same, no
> matter if I choose the local (FreeBSD machine) or a different (remote) one.
>
> I can get a login window from a FreeBSD machine just fine when
> contacting it directly  with "X -query <host>", but not going over the
> chooser on that machine with "X -indirect <host>". As it works fine using
> the chooser from a Linux box, it looks like something is broken between
> the chooser and the xdm login on my FreeBSD machine.
> Using Google, I found someone describing exactly the same issue a couple
> of years ago: <https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/5904/>
> Unfortunately, there is no solution mentioned there.
>
> Any hints would be greatly appreciated...
>
>
> cu
>   Gerrit
>

Unfortunately, reports like this are often lost and never seen by anyone so
might fix them, especially when dealing with software that is not commonly
used. Mail is transitory for most people and often messages to mail lists
are simply skipped when it is not convenient to read them. While it is fine
to report these issues to the maintainer, problems should really be
reported as bugs to the FreeBSD Bugzilla. https://bugs/freebsd.org/bugzilla
It may not be fixed promptly, but at least it won't be forgotten or lost.

I just checked and found no report of this problem. Please open a bug and
the odds of this being fixed will improve significantly, though not by me
as I have not used xdm in at least 20 years and probably could not fix it
if I did.
--
Kevin Oberman, Part-time goat herder and retired network engineer