Now that was a machine I SSH'ed into with X-Forwarding, doesn't have X installed locally. So I tried on my laptop (with X):
Do both systems have X installed? It looks like either one -not- having X will suppress consolehelper's graphical form. If you just run /usr/bin/up2date as yourself, what happens then (I get a popup window)?
[whooper@butters whooper]$ sudo up2date <forward, forward, checking, no updates, blah blah> [whooper@butters whooper]$
That looks pretty reasonable. [bevan@wallace ~]> sudo /usr/bin/up2date Password: X11 connection rejected because of wrong authentication.
Maybe you have old versions of config files left over?
These were all clean installs, although I do go back and replace some config files to make the system play properly in the environment.
The relevant-ish are:
/etc/nsswitch.conf
/etc/ldap.conf
/etc/pam.d/system-auth
/etc/sysconfig/authconfig
/etc/ssh/sshd_config
It's got my curiosity now... I want to know why our systems seemingly behave differently.
