[New Feature Idea] X11 forwarding over SSM - is this possible?

[ConercaoAlpha]

Hi,

Would it be possible to integrate X11 forwarding into session-manager? I've attempted a few things such as port forwarding, but I've had no luck.

[Yangtao-Hua]

Hi @ConercaoAlpha,
That is an interesting feature, I will cut a feature request task to team and tracking it. But cannot guarantee it as a high priority task for now based on team bandwidth.

Thanks,
Yangtao

[justinmk3]

SSH over SSM is already supported, and X11 can be forwarded over SSH. What else is needed here?

[Yangtao-Hua]

Hi @ConercaoAlpha,
Thanks to @justinmk3's notification, I made some test and it works for me when using SSH session. There is no special effort for us to change on Session-Manager-Plugin and Amazon-SSM-Agent, so it not like a new feature, but need some configuration update by customer on SSH config.

Here is some steps may be helpful on your debugging.

1. Make sure without Session Manager, your "ssh -X" command works. Then try tunneling with Session Manager
2. I used command like ssh -i "your_private.pem" ec2-user@i-instanceid -v -X, added -v for debugging;
3. If you noticed "debug1: X11 forwarding requested but DISPLAY not set" in the log, try run "export DISPLAY=:0" on your local terminal.
4. If you are using MacOS (same with my case), please installed XQuartz.

Thanks,
Yangtao

[ConercaoAlpha]

Hi,

I've tested the method over SSH and it works, but I was wondering if this would be possible over SSM natively. No worries if that's too much trouble though!

[kkrav3ts]

Hi @ConercaoAlpha, Thanks to @justinmk3's notification, I made some test and it works for me when using SSH session. There is no special effort for us to change on Session-Manager-Plugin and Amazon-SSM-Agent, so it not like a new feature, but need some configuration update by customer on SSH config.

Here is some steps may be helpful on your debugging.

1. Make sure without Session Manager, your "ssh -X" command works. Then try tunneling with Session Manager

2. I used command like `ssh -i "your_private.pem" ec2-user@i-instanceid -v -X`, added -v for debugging;

3. If you noticed "debug1: X11 forwarding requested but DISPLAY not set" in the log, try run "export DISPLAY=:0" on your local terminal.

4. If you are using MacOS (same with my case), please installed XQuartz.

Thanks, Yangtao

@Yangtao-Hua For point 4. could you please advise what to do/install if I am on Windows? Thanks in advance.