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.
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.
_ ____ ____ __________
| | / / / / / / /_ __/ __ \
| | / / / / / / / / / /_/ /
| |/ / /_/ / /___/ / / _, _/
|___/\____/_____/_/ /_/ |_|
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/
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.