In my last post, I talked about reconfiguring the /etc/ssh_config file to enable X11 Forwarding over an ssh connection. It turns out this step is unnecessary in Tiger. Instead, you can provide the “-Y” argument to the ssh command, which enables “trusted X11 forwarding”.

> ssh -Y hostname

I learned this the hard way. After I reconfigured my /etc/ssh_config file to enable X11 forwarding, I was indeed able to successfully load DBDesigner over the network (ssh connection with no args). However, I was unable to work with ER diagrams within the DBDesigner interface. The tables would disappear from the screen when I tried to drag them around, and the program ran very very slow.

I tested this process on a separate machine (PowerBook) running Panther. DBDesigner loaded and worked fine, although still a bit sluggish. This had me convinced there was a compatability issue with X11/ssh and Tiger. I searched in Google and found this thread (among others) which mentions the new -Y arg introduced to ssh in Tiger.

Note: The -X argument enables X11 Forwarding over ssh. Using this argument also makes it unnecessary to change the /etc/ssh_config in Panther.