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Sysadmins - What's in Your MOTD?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the daily-thoughts-from-BOFHs dept.

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 Recently, this has been replaced by a page that announces general University business such as Open weeks, upcoming awards etc.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?"

5 of 176 comments (clear)

  1. Funny you should ask. by grub · · Score: 5, Funny


    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]$


    --
    Trolling is a art,
    1. Re:Funny you should ask. by duplicate-nickname · · Score: 5, Funny
      /me is confused
      C:\>cat /etc/motd
      'cat' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
      operable program or batch file.
       
      C:\>
      --

      ÕÕ

  2. From Mail/Calendaring server by apenzott · · Score: 5, Funny

    Events on calendar are closer than they appear.

    --
    The Roman Rule: The one who says it cannot be done shall not interrupt the one who is doing it.
  3. Re:Mine is ... by plover · · Score: 5, Funny
    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.

    --
    John
  4. who are the diskhogs by Aaton · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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.