X11

does anyone use X11 at all? i use it occasionally, mainly for opening text files in emacs, or viewing images with imagemagick.

anyways, this recently stopped working on dreamhost. support said that "X11 is disabled in the sshd_config across the board," and i am still waiting to find out why.

is anyone else as annoyed by this as i am?

i am also hobbled by this change, since i do all of my development/maintenance through emacs in an x-window (for happy and easy cut-and-paste between text files on other servers).

i'm really looking forward to ssh being re-configured to allow this again...

You will have to adapt to work without it. Dreamhost provides web hosting, not remote desktop machines.

If you're doing serious development, you really should have your own local environment that mirrors most of Dreamhost's configuration.

For casual editing, use a file transfer program such as FileZilla to 1) download file to be edited 2) launch local editor 3) wait for editor to close 4) upload if changed. Or use a semi-GUI text editor in a shell like Midnight Commander ("mc -e FILENAME"). Or if you're on a Linux machine on your end, mount your Dreamhost home folder over sshfs.

mirroring dreamhost's configuration on my own local environment is not "serious development," it is serious sysadmin.

thanks for the tip on sshfs tho, that actually does sound useful.

> If you're doing serious development, you really should have
> your own local environment that mirrors most of
> Dreamhost's configuration.

Or at the very least, create a separate environment on Dreamhost (perhaps with a different user) which you can use for testing. Personally, I've created a subdomain for all of my development work and, when I've created what I consider to be a finished release, I just copy the files from my development subdomain to where the public live site is hosted. Another advantage to this approach is that, with some clever commit hooks, my entire development environment is an automatically updated subversion working copy, so I can make changes and do preliminary debugging on my PC, then `svn commit` the changes to instantly see the result in the Dreamhost environment.

I also use sshfs for more general file management and it works great for day to day filesystem tasks. The downside is that it can feel a bit sluggish at times, and I occasionally get stupid and try to untar some large tarball over the network. But I imagine even that must feel a heck of a lot faster than trying to forward X sessions -- those have always seemed sluggish to me even over a LAN.

wow, thanks for the sshfs tip. i had no idea about that, but as i can now see, it's way f***ing cooler than the way i was doing it, and i don't have to switch between ssh and sftp.

thanks!