HVTA [cnttbachkhoa]

In order to change the message of the day, we first want to edit the  file “/etc/motd.tail”. You might have noticed that this file does not  contain all the information you was presented with when you logged in,  and you might also have noticed the “motd” file in the same folder. The  “/etc/motd” file is where all this information is gathered and the  actual file presented to you. So if you want a one-time change to your  motd that will be reverted on reboot, you can edit the “/etc/motd” file.

I am not sure if I changed something, but after I had edited the  motd.tail file, the system information was no longer being updated. In  order to turn it back on, I had to enable the motd updates with the  following command: “update-motd –enable” (this means you can’t update  the “/etc/motd” file though, as it will be overwritten fairly recently).  There is a cronjob attached to this updating, which updates every 10  minutes. If you do not want the system information, you might want to  remove this (it is installed at: “/etc/cron.d/update-motd”).

If you do want the system information, you might not want to display  the last line of text saying:

This is fairly easy to remove. Open the file  “/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/landscape/sysinfo/landscapelink.py”  and find the following three lines:

And comment them out like this:

This looks pretty good, but you might notice that if you boot the  server and log in right away, there are no system information. This is  because the cron job haven’t had a chance to run yet. Luckily, it is  something we can solve.

Go to the folder “/etc/rcS.d/” and find the file called “Sxxbootmisc.sh”.  The x’s in bold are a value, but the exact number varies – for  instance, on two of my computers it is S80bootmisc.sh and  S55bootmisc.sh. This file is run when the computer boots. When you  located it, open it. Scroll through it until you find a line saying “#  Update motd”. Here you can add the following line:  “/etc/update-motd.d/50-landscape-sysinfo >> /var/run/motd”. This  will make the system information be updated and added to the motd file  when the computer boots.

The file mentioned above (50-landscape-sysinfo) might also be worth  to look into, though it does not give many options for editing, but it  would be possible to add a command such as “uptime” to what is shown.

When you log in through SSH, besides showing the motd, it will also  tell you the last login to the server. Should you want to turn this line  off, this is done in the file “/etc/ssh/sshd_config” where you change  the line:

to

Simple as that.