Message of the Day (MOTD) at login

Linux
Author

Vinh Nguyen

Published

December 14, 2010

On Ubuntu 10.04, I like it how the the login message tells me system load, memory usage, and other useful statistics when I ssh into the machine. Found out that the script is known as landscape-sysinfo, and it is executed via the package update-motd. Basically, you can add modify the MOTD by adding scripts that output messages into /etc/update-motd.d/. See here for a more thorough explanation.

In the following, I make it so that I can see the usage of all the mounted disks I have on my NAS:

sudo emacs -q -nw /etc/update-motd.d/51-hdd-df
#! /bin/sh
df -h | grep -v none
## done
sudo +x chmod /etc/update-motd.d/51-hdd-df
## logout and login