Editing motd in Debian wheezy

[gdt]

I don't know what it is with the Debian family of operating systems and their sheer contempt for whatever messages the system administrator might want to give to their users via /etc/motd, but I'll leave a full excoriation of that for this wonderful rant.

Wheezy is an improvement. The PAM subsystem prints two files when you login: /etc/motd followed by /run/motd.dynamic. If you edit /etc/motd then your changes are retained. Those changes even survive a reboot. Cheers from the peanut gallery for a return to expected behaviour.

/run/motd.dynamic contains the output of uname. I have no idea why. In what way is the current kernel version useful information at all to someone who can't type uname -a for themselves?

Linux raspberrypi 3.10.25+ #622 PREEMPT Fri Jan 3 18:41:00 GMT 2014 armv6l

That thing which looks to the user like a date and time, that's not the current date and time. Oh no, Debian think the typical user would much rather know the date and time the kernel was compiled.

To burn this insanity with fire you can edit /etc/pam.d/sshd and /etc/pam.d/login, deleting the line:

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

But is that such a really great idea? The PAM module configuration could well get security updates, and if we have changed those files, then we'll miss the updates.

An alternative is to not create the /run/motd.dynamic file. Let's remove the package which creates that file:

$ dpkg-query --search /etc/init.d/motd 
initscripts: /etc/init.d/motd

Hmm, on second thoughts removing the initscripts package isn't going to be a great idea.

Let's just disable the initscript which creates /run/motd.dynamic.

$ sudo sudo update-rc.d motd remove
$ sudo rm /run/motd.dynamic 

Of course the Debian Wheezy init system is so borked that the /etc/init.d/motd script will be reenabled if the initscripts package is updated. But this seems the least harm approach.

Seriously though, I do wonder who thought it necessary to print the kernel version to every user upon every login. It's not the thing a user most wants to know.