Article

Table of Contents
Theme:
Was this article helpful?
Try Vultr Today with

$50 Free on Us!

Want to contribute?

You could earn up to $600 by adding new articles.

Setting an SSH Motd on Ubuntu 14.04

Last Updated: Fri, Aug 21, 2015
Ubuntu
Archived content

This article is outdated and may not work correctly for current operating systems or software.

An SSH MOTD is a message that users will see when they log into SSH. On Ubuntu 14.04, the default message appears similar to the following text:

Welcome to Ubuntu 14.04.3 LTS (GNU/Linux 3.13.0-57-generic x86_64)



 * Documentation:  https://help.ubuntu.com/



  System information as of Fri Aug 21 04:02:11 EDT 2015



  System load:  0.02               Processes:           92

  Usage of /:   22.3% of 19.56GB   Users logged in:     0

  Memory usage: 28%                IP address for eth0: 0.0.0.0

  Swap usage:   0%



  Graph this data and manage this system at:

    https://landscape.canonical.com/

The "System load", "Processes", and other statistics are all dynamic and indicate the actual status of the server.

Step 1: Creating your own MOTD

You can add your own MOTD message. Simply create the file /etc/motd:

touch /etc/motd

Then place your message in it:

vi /etc/motd

If you would like to use ASCII art, you can use a generator, such as this one.

 _    ____  ____  __________ 

| |  / / / / / / /_  __/ __ \

| | / / / / / /   / / / /_/ /

| |/ / /_/ / /___/ / / _, _/ 

|___/\____/_____/_/ /_/ |_|  

Step 2: Removing the default messages

If you would prefer to hide the default information, you need to remove landscape-common:

apt-get remove --purge landscape-common

This will trim the message down to the following text:

Welcome to Ubuntu 14.04.3 LTS (GNU/Linux 3.13.0-57-generic x86_64)



 * Documentation:  https://help.ubuntu.com/

Step 3: Putting back the default messages

To restore the original MOTD, run the following commands:

apt-get install landscape-common

dpkg-reconfigure landscape-common

Select the last option (Run sysinfo on every login) and press Tab to navigate to the "OK" button so that you can press Enter.

Want to contribute?

You could earn up to $600 by adding new articles.