X11 Forwarding over SSH

Holy crap. I just spent about five hours banging my head against a wall.

In an effort to try to secure connections, I've been trying to get more things tunneled through ssh to lock down some more ports to our DMZ network. Today, I've been working on getting X Windows applications to tunnel over ssh to my PC.

I read a couple online manuals.

I connected from PuTTY on my PC to a Solaris 9 box on our DMZ. Ssh session came right up. I turned on X11 forwarding and enabled it on the server and tried to log in again. No dice. It closed the connection right after I typed in the password. I must be doing something wrong.

I did some more web searching. Read several more tutorials about ssh and X11 forwarding. Still no dice. Still must be doing something wrong. Click this. Click that. Edit this config file, edit that. Nope. Passive, active, indirect. Nope. Port forwarding. No port forwarding. Nope. DISPLAY set. DISPLAY not set. Nope. Nope. Nothing in the PuTTY logs.

I really must not understand this ssh/X11 forwarding thing at all. Yet every document I read has virtually the same instructions. What could I be missing?

I finally happen to check the error log on the Solaris 9 box itself. Sure enough, there were errors that corresponded to each of my login attempts. I did some more web searching and finally found it: a bug report for a Solaris 9 patch that causes X11 forwarding to fail. Effin' A.

I tried one of my Solaris 10 servers. Worked the first time. Five hours gone up in smoke. No wonder I'm quiet at the dinner table. I just worked hard all day doing nothing.