Using TS applications transparently by ssh

[Jan Luehr]

Hello,

for quite a long time, we've been using Cygwin/X without any trouble. I just 
linked XWin.exe -query on our desktops, copied the cygwin-dlls to system32 
and was happy to use my terminal-server. However, in this scenario a whole 
new KDE instance is started, requiering RAM, CPU, I/O etc. .
For security reasons and in order to spare server ressources and to make the 
desktop more simple, we'd like to run single applications, accessed by ssh 
instead of whole sessions accessed by xdmcp.
The plan is to link the single applications into the users start menu. If 
users click 'em, an xserver will be started  (if none is started already), 
connect to the server (public key ssh) and lunch the application over there.
Thus I installed cygwin an a fresh "next generation" workstation as 
Administrator, ran bash, ran startx, which starts xterm here, ssh'ed (-X) to 
the terminal server, fired up xlock and got it. wonderful. ;-)
Next I tried it as domain admin (we've some XP Pro Boxes in a samba hosted 
domain here).
When I fired up bash, I got some warning, about my group beeing makepasswd and 
tried to generate it by mkpasswd -d. (Does the /etc/passwd and my domain user 
datebases really kept to be in sync in my scenario?). 
For some reason I got

mkpasswd (272): [2221] user not found 

(translated)
I looked at my /etc/passwd, found admin (my domain administrator) in there 
(however, there is no other domain user listed) and run startx. A new xterm 
shell popped up. I ssh'ed to our terminal server, started xclock, which 
returned the following error:

connect /tmp/.X11-unix/X0: Connection refused
X connection to localhost:10.0 broken (explicit kill or server shutdown).

(This is rather strange imho, since an xserver, and at least one client 
(xterm) was running at the moment).

What did I do wrong? Are there some things I've to reconsider?
Is someone using cygwin in a simular scenario?

Thanks in advance
Keep smiling
yanosz

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