Nice and informative Message of the Day

This project tries to make actual use of nice feature of Linux which is Message of the Day (motd) shown upon login. Inspired by Ubuntu's dynamic motd, I wanted to bring similar feature to other Linux distros.

The result is custom tailored to my needs and tested on Debian 9 & 8 as well as Linux Mint 19.

Preview

When you ssh into the machine, you will see an output similar to this:

Welcome to Debian GNU/Linux 9.6 (stretch)
  Kernel: #1 SMP Debian 4.9.130-2 (2018-10-27)
System is up 2 weeks, 2 hours, 5 minutes

System information as of Tue Nov 27 17:04:46 CET 2018

  CPU load: 0.09 0.03 0.01 (114 processes)
  Memory:   488M  ( 6%)  out of 8.0G
  Swap:     not available
  Disk:      31G  (54%)  out of  60G

Users logged in: gaeldrin (1 user total)

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

Last login: Tue Nov 27 17:04:26 2018 from 127.0.0.1

Installation

1. Clone the repository anywhere on the box

    git clone https://github.com/Gaeldrin/nice-motd.git
   

2. Run the installation script or repeat selected steps manually

    nice-motd/install.sh
   

3. [optional] On Debian 8 (as well as possibly other systems), you might still see the same old motd after successful installation. In this case, you need to edit the PAM configuration that does not work properly. Open the file /etc/pam.d/sshd and change lines like this

    #session    optional     pam_motd.so  motd=/run/motd.dynamic
    session    optional     pam_motd.so  motd=/run/motd
   

Uninstallation

1. Navigate to the cloned folder and run the removal script

    nice-motd/uninstall.sh
   

2. Remove the cloned folder

    rm -rf nice-motd