Sysadmins - What's in Your MOTD?

permaculture asks: "This is a 'knowledge management' issue, on a University network. For many years we've had a network 'Message of the Day' that appears when any network user logs in. MOTD lists planned service outages for maintenance, progress on current issues, upcoming holidays, and other items that affect network users. Recently, this has been replaced by a page that announces general University business such as Open weeks, upcoming awards etc. There's a link on the page to the network MOTD that used to greet every user immediately after login. Does your network have a 'Message of the Day' that appears at login? Is it a Corporate business page, entirely related to network services, or something else entirely?"

Comments

Funny you should ask.

[grub]

I was just thinking of upgrading mine. It currently reads:

[grub@shrubbery grub]$ cat /etc/motd

"Ask Slashdot" has reached a new low!

[grub@shrubbery grub]$

Re:Funny you should ask.

[duplicate-nickname]

/me is confused

C:\>cat /etc/motd
'cat' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.
 
C:\>

Re:Funny you should ask.

[Richard Steiner]

Wow... I get a completely different response:

>cat /etc/motd
DATA IGNORED - IN CONTROL MODE

From Mail/Calendaring server

[apenzott]

Events on calendar are closer than they appear.

Message of the eon

[ZiZ]

DoublePlusBSD 0.0.0 (BIGBROTHER) #1: Wed Feb 29 04:20:00 GMT 1984

      not entirely working in your best interests
                            -- since 1984 --

Access to and use of this server is restricted to those
activities expressly permitted by the system administion
staff.  If you're not sure if it's allowed, DON'T DO IT.

why bother, people don't read

[Gothmolly]

And if they do read, they don't care. If you tell them that Friday at 3pm, the a server is going down, they'll ignore it, and call you at 3:01 screaming that they are kicked off.

People don't care about your silly technical problems, they've learned that screaming loudly works, as it does. They don't care that you had to reboot the mail server because Exchange died again, goddammit, they have important email to send, what are you, incompetent?

And, your boss will kiss their ass and make excuses for your failures, and discuss grand schemes to Make Sure It Doesn't Happen Again.

Yes, I work at $LARGE_US_BANK, and this sort of thing does happen. Technologists are only ever the reason that people can't get work done, we're never seen as enablers.

Why do you think the BastardOperatorFromHell is such a powerful meme?

Re:Sarbox Bites

[Fallen Kell]

You do know that is what the /etc/issue and /etc/issue.net files are for don't you? You can even have them referenced in ssh connections as well if you modify your pam config files.

I hate stupid users.

[__aaxwdb6741]

Rule #1: Do not speak about dienub
Rule #2: Do not speak about dienub
Rule #3: Whatever it was in that cool movie
Rule #4: If I dislike your behaviour on this server, I will purge your
                account, and publish your entire home directory in a public IRC
                channel.
                This includes, nonexclusively, sending global messages, using retarded
                exploits (Both against this and other servers), ban evasion, etc.

Too many faulty login attempts will get you banned by DenyHosts. Generate a
fucking keypair and use it for authentication. Passwords are insecure.

Sincerely,
Your friendly BOFH.

Re:Mine is ...

[plover]

One day one of the guys left his terminal logged in as root. I edited it from a call to fortune to instead be:

echo He who forgets the past is doomed to repeat it.

Of course, once he found out who did it, he changed my the folder on my user account from /usr/~john to /dev/floppy until I went begging his forgiveness. I didn't do it again.

MOTD

[Ryan Amos]

All your bash are belong to us.

Moore's Law "Disk is 99% full - CleanUp" motd gone

[billstewart]

Sorry for the clunky title, but that's what I could fit in a Subject Line box.

Historically there were two common contents for motd - fortune, and a note from the administrator saying that the file system was almost full so please clean up your files, and this applied to just about any multi-user server with just about any operating system. Moore's Law has changed this for most systems I've dealt with - disk capacities have been growing rapidly and prices dropping rapidly, and disk drives really are no longer running 99% full except for individuals' PCs that are full of MP3s or videos. Sometimes you'll see messages like that from MS Exchange Mail Server operators who are running shared mailbox servers on expensive fast disks, but otherwise the disk capacity most places finally outpaces user demand.

Unfortunately, bureaucrats acting as amateur lawyers have typically replaced that message with some badly written threatening legalese drivel that has no clue about what the laws actually say; they'd be just as well off with a message that said "The Wizard says: Go away and come back tomorrow!"

who are the diskhogs

[Aaton]

If you don't already have quotas you might run into some users eating more then there fair share of disk space. Run something like this nightly from cron job and place the output in /etc/motd. Your biggest diskhogs will be known to everyone that logs in.

#!/bin/bash
# Usage: diskhog [dir] [count]
# If nothing given defaults to /home and 10

HOMES=${1:-/home}
COUNT=${2:-10}
SMALLDIV= "-----"
IGNORELIST="proc"

if [ ! -d $HOMES ] ; then
echo "$HOMES needs to be a directory. Use the full path"
exit
fi

cd $HOMES

echo "`date +%D` Disk Hogs: $HOMES"
echo "$SMALLDIV";
du -ks `ls -l | egrep -ie "^d" |egrep -iv $IGNORELIST | awk '{print $9}'` | sort -rn | head -$COUNT;
echo "$SMALLDIV";

May not be the best method but works under Linux. You might need to change the awk number if your ls doesn't output like mine.

Re:We have a new MOTD

[r3jjs]

We are the electrons.

Resistance is voltage / current.

Re:Warning Mac user

[AFCArchvile]

I tweaked mine a bit:

Somebody spilled Macintosh in my BSD!

A nice simple one

[Trogre]

It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.