Search This Blog

Monday, 16 August 2010

Firefox with X tunneling opens on the local machine- duh!

So you're logged onto a local machine with X-windows- maybe it's linux, maybe it's Windows with an X-server application (Xming is good and free), and you've got an ssh connection to another remote system, with X-tunnelling switched on. At the command prompt for the remote system you type 'firefox &' (or just 'firefox' for that matter). It opens firefox on the remote system, displayed in an X-window on the local system- right? Well- maybe. If you have firefox already running on your local system, you may just get a new window from your local  firefox. Huh?

The answer is, it does open an X-window on the local machine- then it looks to see if there's a Firefox window on that display, and if it manages to find one, it connects to that instance and opens a new window. Which is brain-dead- if I wanted a new local window, I'd open one. I wanted a remote firefox window (maybe the remote system has access to machines that my local one doesn't. Say it's a HPC system frontend and I want to access IPMI cards on the nodes).

And the $64k question- how do you stop it doing this witless thing?

firefox -no-remote

Thanks to JMax, who posted this in Mozilla support but I could only find it through the google cache- it appears to have been deleted (very suspicious), and also to this Ubuntu thread http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-477493.html

No comments:

Post a Comment