Just curious

[Terry Washington]

Does anyone know the purpose of the file .ICEauthority that is generated in your home directory when you log into CDE in an NIS environment?

[Sam Rudland]

I believe that ICEauthority is used for authentication between two XWindows servers. It is essentially a list of clients that are allowed access to your server. Is it causing you any problems?? You can delete it and it should be rebuilt automaticaly.

[Marcin Wicinski · Accepted solution]

Hi Terry,

This link should be useful:

http://www.rzg.mpg.de/rzg/batch/NEC/sx5_doc/g1ae04e/chap11.html#start

later,

[Terry Washington]

This file was referenced in a login error that was generated after an old NIS map was pushed to a client. I was just curious as to the purpose of the file. The problem has since been corrected.

[Alex Glennie]

ICE is used to provide a skeleton for session management and
is used by session managers, such as dtsession. dtsession,
of course, has its own methods, but uses the underlying
technology as a matter of course. ICE stands for Inter-Client
Exchange and it "provides a generic framework for building
protocols on top of reliable, byte-stream transport connections."

The best source of reference on ICE is the URL quoted earlier.

The O'Reilly book Programmer's Supplement for Release 6 has
some information on libICE and libSM.
ICE it is part of X11R6 - not any release of the OS. libICE exists at
10.20 as well, only dtsession doesn't use it.

The 2 instances I know that can cause ICE errors are :

1) Users sharing the same $HOME directory, but having differeing UID's.
2) NIS problems where the users nis passwd files are not being read correctly ...

So if you had a NIS problem it would fit ...