sysmotd is essentially a shell script that produces a Message Of The Day (MOTD) that includes 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 do not have their own dynamic MOTD generator.

As of time of writting, 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 a MOTD, and I decided to research how I could add my own message with some system statistics 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. Theirs runs scripts in /etc/update-motd.d. Also, their PAM configuration includes lines for static and dyanamic 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 a user logged 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 if they have not implemented it yet, it is because they have some valid reasons.

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 that changes every 60 minutes.
• 01-sysmotd-sysinfo.motd: system information which is updated every 60 seconds.
• 02-sysmotd-updates.motd: updates available which is updated every 60 minutes. 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 dnf 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 too.

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, my recommendation is to download the rpm package under rpmbuild/RPMS/noarch in this repo, and install it with dnf.

sudo dnf install sysmotd-0.0.4-1.fc39.noarch.rpm

You can also install it directly from this repo. Head to releases to get the link and then install it with dnf.

sudo dnf install https://github.com/innovara/sysmotd/releases/download/0.0.4/sysmotd-0.0.4-1.fc39.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.