[ILUG] ssh cleverness?

[Brendan Halpin]

I'm puzzled, and more than a little impressed.

I'm sitting at home, on the laptop, with (in a gnome-terminal) an
ssh session to my work machine (via broadband). If I run an
X-program on my work machine it displays (more or less efficiently)
on my laptop. As it should.

However, if I have firefox running locally on the laptop, an
invocation of firefox on the work machine will not run it remotely,
but will cause the laptop firefox to fetch the relevant page. Very
clever[1]. But how does it do it? In particular, *what* knows that
I have firefox running on the X-server? Is it ssh? sshd? X?
Firefox? The FSM? 

Brendan

[1] Irritating, too, because I was trying to use an institutional
subscription from home. Workaround: shut down the laptop firefox
first. 
-- 
Brendan Halpin,  Department of Sociology,  University of Limerick,  Ireland
Tel: w +353-61-213147 f +353-61-202569 h +353-61-338562; Room F2-025 x 3147
mailto:brendan.halpin at ul.ie  http://www.ul.ie/sociology/brendan.halpin.html