update-motd doesn't generate motd

[Eric Olsen]

I was playing with update-motd, I created a couple files: 09-title and 10-server-info

09-title was simply an ascii of my server's name, and 10-server-info was a script to display a parsed-output of df and uptime.

Everything was working great, until I renamed 10-server-info to 60-server-info so it would display after 50-landscape-sysinfo. Once I did this, and ran sudo update-motd, my 10-server-info showed up both before landscape-sysinfo AND after. If I modified 60-server-info the changes would reflect in the text after landscape-sysinfo, but the old 10-server-info was still showing up in /etc/motd even though it didn't exist.

I've since removed both 09-title and 60-server-info from /etc/update-motd.d/ as well as emptying out /etc/motd, but that seems to have made it worse, as now the motd isn't being populated at all.

I haven't been able to find any way to get a verbose output of what's happening when update-motd executes to see if one of the scripts is failing, or some error is occuring, nor have I found any mention of logs anywhere. Is there any way for me to discover why motd isn't being populated (and why it was getting extra text from a no-longer-existant file)?

Thanks!

[Eric Olsen (falconv)]

It was suggested I create a bug for this. I personally don't know if it's a bug or not, but without knowing of any way to get verbose output or logs from update-motd I can't troubleshoot this myself first.

[Dustin Kirkland  (kirkland)]

Can you try just removing /var/run/motd, and see what you get?

Also, what version of Ubuntu are you dealing with? This behavior has
changed significantly over the last few releases...

[Eric Olsen (falconv)]

Out of curiosity, I looked at that file and it's what I'm expecting to see in /etc/motd. Per your instruction I removed it (I moved it to /var/run/motd.old) and ran update-motd. /var/run/motd was generated, but /etc/motd remained the same. I removed /etc/motd and ran update-motd again, but /etc/motd still wasn't generated.

I'm running Ubuntu 9.10 server (2.6.28-18-server). If I knew where to check the version of update-motd I could tell you that. Aptitude says I'm on the latest if that helps.

[Dustin Kirkland  (kirkland)]

/etc/motd should be a symlink to /var/run/motd.

Is that not the case?

[Eric Olsen (falconv)]

ahh. It's not, but that would be my fault. I didn't check before removing it hoping it'd get regenerated. I'll create the symbolic link. It won't explain what happened initially, but unless it happens again I'm fine with this. Thanks!

[Dustin Kirkland  (kirkland)]

Thanks for the followup!