MOTD

From Freephile Wiki
The printable version is no longer supported and may have rendering errors. Please update your browser bookmarks and please use the default browser print function instead.

The image above is a "Message Of The Day" or MOTD. It's presented as a sort of 'splash screen' when logging into a remote system via SSH. This article is about how to create your own custom MOTD.


The Ubuntu distribution introduced the update-motd framework which basically assembles the motd from the series of scripts in /etc/update-motd.d


You should read the motd manpage (which you can also access in your console via man update-motd Sadly, the motd man page doesn't even refer to update-motd which is where the details are!?)

Essentially, you create a file in /etc/update-motd.d with a numbered prefix and no suffix. The first line of output should be blank, and the last line of the script should be a carriage return.

cat /etc/update-motd.d/99-footer
#!/bin/sh
#
# modified from the MediaWiki-Vagrant setup for an installation of MediaWiki

rainbow_pipe () {
  local i=0 c
  while IFS= read data; do
    c=$(( 31 + ($i % 7) ))
    IFS=";" printf "\033[%sm" $c 1
    printf "%s\033[0m\n" "${data}"
    i=$((i+1))
  done
}
rainbow_pipe <<'EOM'

                 /
            .,. /
          ,mmmmn   ___  ___           _  _         _    _  _  _     _
  ,._   .,###"nI)  |  \\/  |          | |(_)       | |  | |(_)| |   (_)
 # ###########     | .  . |  ___   __| | _   __ _ | |  | | _ | | __ _
 # ############""  | |\\/| | / _ \\ / _` || | / _` || |/\\| || || |/ /| |
"  ####     #  ./  | |  | ||  __/| (_| || || (_| |\\  /\\  /| ||   < | |
   #'(#     #  "   \\_|  |_/ \\___| \\__,_||_| \\__,_| \\/  \\/ |_||_|\\_\\|_|
   #  ")     #
   #,  '"    '"
EOM
echo
printf " * MediaWiki is located at \033[33;1m/var/www/w/\033[0m.\n"
printf " * To interactively evaluate PHP and MediaWiki code, run '\033[33mhhvmsh\033[0m'.\n"
printf " * For a database shell, run '\033[33mmysql\033[0m'.\n"
printf " * To execute MediaWiki maintenance scripts, run '\033[33mphp -f ...\033[0m' in the maintenance/ folder.\n"
printf " * For help, visit \033[34;4mhttps://www.mediawiki.org\033[0m or \033[33m#mediawiki\033[0m on chat.freenode.net.\n\n"
printf " * For paid help, visit \033[34;4mhttp://eQuality-Tech.com\033[0m or email \033[33minfo@eQuality-Tech.com\033[0m\n\n"
 # there is a newline here. ignore this comment -- it's for illustration only