Comment 8 for bug 269954

And here I thought I was the only one seeing this! This issue has been driving me nuts for the past (2) Ubuntu releases (currently running Hardy). In my case, it's more basic than problems with ssh. I have my home directory in NFS and the desktop seems to "lose" ~/.Xauthority periodically. The symptoms are that I'll be working along and all of sudden nothing will start! If I try, e.g. xclock at the command line it tells me "Xlib: connection to :0.0.. refused..". A simple 'cd ; ls' seems to get things going again. Until the next time.

I have Googled endlessly and can find no mention of it other than this thread of reports. Both Gutsy and Hardy have done this. I'm beginning to suspect the xauth mechanism itself rather than the kernel, but that's just a guess. (If xauth had previously done an open/close round on the file vs. simply calling stat now - for example).

My setup is very simple and only one client machine is actually using the home directory - it's not dueling overwrites of .Xauthority.

I opened a bug report on it, but the person processing the issue simply could not grasp the issue and it's never been addressed.