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Accepted
Varun Chhangani
Asked: 2019-02-19 20:57:16 +0800 CST

Show system information at startup regardless of load

  • 772

When I ssh to my Ubuntu Server, I'm usually greeted with

Welcome to Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS (GNU/Linux 4.15.0-45-generic x86_64)

 * Documentation:  https://help.ubuntu.com
 * Management:     https://landscape.canonical.com
 * Support:        https://ubuntu.com/advantage

 System information disabled due to load higher than 1.0


 * Canonical Livepatch is available for installation.
   - Reduce system reboots and improve kernel security. Activate at:
     https://ubuntu.com/livepatch

0 packages can be updated.
0 updates are security updates.

here,

System information disabled due to load higher than 1.0

Conditionally according to load, runs landscape-sysinfo

  System information as of Tue Feb 19 04:22:46 UTC 2019

  System load:                    0.0
  Usage of /:                     60.2% of 19.78GB
  Memory usage:                   21%
  Swap usage:                     0%
  Processes:                      93
  Users logged in:                1
  IP address for enp0s3:          192.168.56.200
  IP address for enp0s8:          10.0.3.15
  IP address for docker_gwbridge: 172.18.0.1
  IP address for docker0:         172.17.0.1

which I want to be shown unconditionally

How to modify it how to ?

Also, what is meant by load higher than 1.0 ?

How to add/remove other commands to be run at cli login?

server ssh startup login landscape

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    The Message of the day (MOTD) in Ubuntu is controlled by the directory /etc/update-motd.d/ (and the file /etc/update-motd, if any). Particularly, the Landscape info resides in the file /etc/update-motd.d/50-landscape-sysinfo, as simpoir mentioned in their answer.

    On my Ubuntu 16.04, the file /etc/update-motd.d/50-landscape-sysinfo contains some entry settings and then an if block. So to display the information regardless of the condition, you can simply remove all contents except shebang and the if block contents. The result on my Ubuntu 16.04:

    #!/bin/sh
echo
echo -n "  System information as of "
/bin/date
echo
/usr/bin/landscape-sysinfo

    To do this, use the following procedure in the terminal:

    cd /etc/update-motd.d                 # go to the right directory
sudo cp -L 50-landscape-sysinfo{,.bak}  # keep a backup copy: 50-landscape-sysinfo.bak
sudo nano 50-landscape-sysinfo        # edit the file contents using 'nano'
                                      # (or your favorite text editor)
                                      # and paste the above contents to it

    What is meant by load higher than 1.0?

    The load tells how much the hardware resources of your computer are being requested currently. As a rule of thumb, if it’s higher than your computer’s processor (core) count, the tasks get delayed. It’s OK to get the high-load MOTD message just after boot but if it keeps appearing for several days (MOTD may update just once a day), check whether your machine is powerful enough for the tasks it’s performing.

    How to add/remove other commands to be run at cli login?

    There are multiple ways and the right way depends on the purpose. You could simply add a script to the directory /etc/update-motd.d/ but it would be only run when the MOTD is updated.

    • 7

  2. The message you see on login are generated by motd. This specific one is defined in /etc/update-motd.d/50-landscape-sysinfo. To have it run regardless of load (which can make connecting through ssh unresponsive if the load is high), you can simply remove the condition from the file, which will then looks like such:

    #!/bin/sh
echo
echo -n "  System information as of "
/bin/date
echo
/usr/bin/landscape-sysinfo

    As for the load value, it represents load average, about which you can read more https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_(computing)

    • 2