Troubleshooting X11 Forwarding after an SSH tunnel to an EC2 Instance

[John Siano]

I am doing an SSH tunnel to an AWS EC2 instance with the eventual goal of getting a working GUI of Stata.

I've done the SSH connection both through PuTTY and through just my CLI (Git Bash).

When I run xstata through my CLI I get an error message to define the Unix environment variable DISPLAY. I fix this error message by doing
export DISPLAY='IP:0.0' where IP is the IP address of my local computer.

Then, when I run xstata, nothing pops up and nothing is returned in my CLI. I get the same result after doing the SSH tunnel through PuTTY. With PuTTY, I set the display location to be localhost:0 (shown in the screenshot below). The screenshot below shows my PuTTY X11 Forwarding configuration.

PuTTY Configuration

I do have Xming and XLaunch installed on my local computer.

Any suggestions? I think the display location I am providing may be incorrect. All the different configurations I have tried based off docs and also feedback from others on the internet, such as localhost:0, IP:0, etc have not worked. I've also tried using the -X option when doing the ssh, to no avail.

[Jean-Claude Arbaut]

A silly question: have you installed X11 on the EC2 instance? It's not here by default I think. You must also enable X11 forwarding on the server. See this.

[John Siano]

Following up on this thread to say that Jean-Claude Arbaut's answer basically encapsulated the issue. I was so focused on getting the display to work on the client side that I had missed some issues on the server side, one of which is described in Jean's link.