I have tried to write up an article explaining the current state of affairs of /etc/motd in Debian (and other distributions) here:
http://wiki.debian.org/motd One thing to understand is that Ubuntu, while it had an "update-motd" package for a short while, now generates their /etc/motd file through pam (!), through /etc/update-motd.d. The fun thing is that Debian also ships with that patch: the difference is that it doesn't create that directory, so the scripts don't run and the directory is ignored. But right now, if you create that directory and put scripts into it, they will be used to generate an /etc/motd file, on the fly, wich you scripts. So this begs the question: what would `update-motd` do? Would it run things from `/etc/update-motd.d` or just the hardcoded stuff in /etc/init.d/bootlogs? It seems we need to settle on how we want to deal with this now: either we drop the Ubuntu patch of update-motd.d or we expand it to put our scripts there and run them through update-motd and bootlogs. Furthermore, i believe the current behavior of *not* updating this on login is good, since it kept us away from two severe local root security issues. So if we do ship with update-motd.d, I think we should add noupdate to the pam_motd line. Oh and through all that, the documentation needs to be updated because the manpages do not talk about that directory at all right now. Just my two cents. A. -- Advertisers, not governments, are the primary censors of media content in the United States today. - C. Edwin Baker http://www.ad-mad.co.uk/quotes/freespeech.htm
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