Can't open display and Aventail Connect

["Christopher Landrieu" <landrieu at hotmail dot com>]

To all users that have experienced the "Can't open display" problems:

Try using one of the recent cygwin1.dll snapshots (June 22 or later).  I 
believe that it should at least fix the problem for users running Aventail 
Connect.  It fixed the problem for me on Windows 98 SE and Windows 2000 Pro 
with Aventail Connect 3.21.  All clients pop up successfully regardless of 
whether they are in the exception list in the Aventail config file.

The problem, as Mark Oskin pointed out earlier in this list, is with the 
support for the close-on-exec flag on socket descriptors.  I came to the 
same conclusion in my own testing.  Anyway, something about the way that the 
cygwin1.dll was implementing the close-on-exec flag was causing Aventail to 
mark the descriptor as being associated with a regular file, rather than a 
socket.  The subsequent attempt in libX11 to set the socket to non-blocking 
mode then failed with ENOTSOCK.

It turned out that close-on-exec was not fully implemented yet in the Cygwin 
kernel (at least not yet for sockets).

Corinna Vinschen submitted changes on June 22 to properly handle the 
close-on-exec flag on sockets.

I am not sure why there is different behavior in this respect between 
Aventail's wrappers around the Winsock 2 API and the native Winsock API 
itself, but in any case, everything seems to work now with Corinna's fix 
(many thanks to Corinna for making the fix).


This may or may not help the "Can't open display" problem with other VPN and 
firewall software but its worth a try.

Chris Landrieu

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