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Kevin Sedgley
Asked: 2010-04-03 04:52:31 +0800 CST

MOTD debian - is this ever changed by an update?

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Is this ever changed automatically by a system update?

I'm just wondering as I set a 'hilarious' one for a personal server off rackspace cloud, and it seems to have been deleted.

debian

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    See /etc/init.d/bootlogs

    Specifically this line

    # Update motd
uname -snrvm > /var/run/motd
[ -f /etc/motd.tail ] && cat /etc/motd.tail >> /var/run/motd

    Meaning you should put your changes to motd in /etc/motd.tail otherwise its going to get overwritten on boot.

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  2. It might be interesting to add that editing /etc/motd.tail is not enough, the above snippet must be executed to update /etc/motd, the system only updates it on reboot (well, how often do you reboot your servers?)

    Just out of lazyness, and because my server has no load anyways, I update /etc/motd every minute by using cron to execute exactly the code mentioned above.

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