sysmotd is essentially a shell script that produces a Message Of The Day (MOTD) with system information and statistics.
It has been developed and tested on Fedora Linux and it might work on other Red Hat-based distributions with very small tweaks. It should also be relatively simple to port it to other distributions that don't have their own dynamic MOTD generator.
At the time of writing, Fedora only uses pam_motd.so for ssh log ins.
A picture is worth a thousand words.
I am a long term Fedora user. Having worked with some Ubuntu servers lately, I found myself missing the system information and statistics that you get when you log in. When I installed Fedora 37 on a Raspberry Pi4, I saw that cockpit would generate an MOTD, and I decided to research how to add my own message with system information in it.
Out of the various sources I found, I would like to give credit to a couple of them that helped me a lot in figuring out how to get the information that I wanted.
[1] https://github.com/angela-d/motd-for-centos
[2] https://gist.github.com/cha55son/6042560
While those sources gave me a good start, I wanted to reduce the number of dependencies to a minimum and to make the dynamic part of the MOTD as efficient as possible. Hence I re-wrote those and started looking into how I could avoid using the user's profile to trigger the script. That leads us to the next section.
My understanding is that Debian and Ubuntu distribute a patched version
of pam_motd.so that runs scripts in /etc/update-motd.d. Also, their
PAM configuration includes lines for static and dynamic MOTDs.
[3] https://wiki.debian.org/motd
Using a patched version of pam_motd.so would have been the preferred
approach, since the script updating the dynamic part of the MOTD would only
run when the user logs in. However, I didn't know how difficult it would
be to get a change like that approved for Fedora. My assumption was, and
still is, that the people behind Fedora or Red Hat know that Debian and
Ubuntu are using this dynamic MOTD approach and they have some reasons
for not implementing it.
Having made that assumption, I resorted to use a systemd service to call the script and a timer to call the service, every minute. However, not all the parts of the script run every minute.
So, sysmotd is comprised of:
The shell script. It produces 3 files which are saved under /run/motd.d
- 00-sysmotd-header.motd: colorful header. It changes every 60 minutes.
- 01-sysmotd-sysinfo.motd: system information. It is updated every 60 seconds.
- 02-sysmotd-updates.motd: updates available. It is updated every 60 minutes but it uses Fedora's own dnf cache which runs whenever it runs.
A systemd service to run the script. It is disabled and it should stay like that.
A systemd timer to run the service every 60 seconds. The script works out which parts of the MOTD to update. It is enabled and started when the rpm package is installed.
A systemd preset file to disable sysmotd.service and enable sysmotd.timer by default.
In summary, what you get when you install sysmotd is a systemd timer that every 60 seconds runs a service, that runs a script, which in turn updates the header every 60 minutes, system's information every 60 seconds, and the updates available every 60 minutes.
These are the Fedora packages that you need to have installed for sysmotd to work:
bash coreutils dnf figlet findutils gawk lolcat procps-ng systemd
Most systems will have all of them installed apart from figlet and lolcat.
To install sysmotd and its dependencies, head to releases and get the link to the rpm package for your system. Then use it to install it with dnf.
sudo dnf install https://github.com/innovara/sysmotd/releases/download/0.0.7/sysmotd-0.0.7-1.fc41.noarch.rpm
You can of course also download the rpm and install it with dnf.
sudo dnf install sysmotd-0.0.7-1.fc41.noarch.rpm
If you rather not install a package from an unknown source, and I wouldn't blame you for that, you can clone this repo and, after inspecting the files listed under the structure section, copy them to their respective folders. Please note that if you do this, and you are running SElinux enforced, you will have to fix the context of the files.