[nfbcs] help with X11 forwarding

[John G Heim]

Well, other people have commented on the technical issues and I have 
some points to make in that regard too. But another point to be made is 
that your instructor is legally required to make his course material 
available to you in an accessible format. I am not sure what he'd be 
going for with this X11 forwarding thing. Ssh is a key part of security 
but I am not sure why he'd insist that you use X11 forwarding. You may 
have to go to him and get him to let you do something else that allows 
you to learn the same thing about computer security. He is legally 
obligated to do that if possible. Don't let him try to weasel out of it 
either.  Some instructors look upon this kind of thing as an exciting 
challenge and some look upon it as a bother.

So he gave you like the config files and virtual disk files for a 
virtual machine and you have to run it on your own PC and then ssh into 
it? To do that, you'd have to install his choice of virtualization 
software and some kind of X11 client. Most students have either Windows 
or Apple computers and getting X11 forwarding working would be a problem 
for all of them. You wouldn't really be learning anything about security 
while getting all that working so I don't know what he's going for. 
There may be some exploit in X11 that he's trying to get you to 
understand. That's quite a reach though. Anyway, the point is that there 
has to be something else you can do to learn the same thing.

I tried sshing into a linux machine from my Mac and discovered that X11 
forwarding does not work. I am not a Mac expert but I thought Macs ran X 
windows. Turns out not. But there is an apple project for doing X11 on a 
Mac.  See:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201341

You might also consider subscribing to the orca support list. It's a 
very active list and if there is a way to get it to work, they'd know.
orca-list at gnome.org

On 09/16/2015 04:59 PM, Amanda Lacy via nfbcs wrote:
> I'm trying to take a network security class. The professor has given
> me an inaccessible VM (no Orca installed) and wants me to ssh into it
> with X11 forwarding enabled. Then I'm supposed to open the web browser
> Iceweasel and visit some web address.
>
> My problem: the browser opens but I can't navigate it with a screen
> reader. Is there any way to get this to work? At the moment I'm
> running the VM on Windows but I have a Mac I can also use.
>
> Thanks,
> Amanda
>
> _______________________________________________
> nfbcs mailing list
> nfbcs at nfbnet.org
> http://nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nfbcs_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nfbcs:
> http://nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nfbcs_nfbnet.org/jheim%40math.wisc.edu
>

-- 
John Heim, jheim at math.wisc.edu, skype:john.g.heim