motd is now printed twice

KenJackson · 07-11-2018, 06:19 PM

/etc/motd is always printed when I ssh into my Fedora 28 system. But recently it started printing out twice. Don't know why. Not sure where to look. Any ideas?

wpeckham · 07-11-2018, 07:35 PM

I would start by checking the profile, .profile, profile.d, then the bashrc and bash_profile controls at all levels.

KenJackson · 07-11-2018, 10:39 PM

Oh, yeah, I looked through and grepped /etc/profile and all the files in /etc/profile.d/ and dot files in ~ before posting.

I found a note in man login that says, "Note that the same functionality is also provided by pam_motd(8) PAM module." And sure enough, there's a line in /etc/pam.d/sshd that says, "session optional pam_motd.so".

So maybe login and pam_motd.so are both displaying motd. But it didn't used to and I didn't change it. If an update changed it, wouldn't it be happening for everyone?

wpeckham · 07-12-2018, 06:24 AM

That depends. Have you installed anything (outside of simple updates) since before this started? Have you removed depreciated packages?

KenJackson · 07-12-2018, 09:34 AM

The command "rpm -qa | grep fc26 | wc -l" returns 4.
The command "rpm -qa | grep fc27 | wc -l" returns 99.
But those aren't necessarily deprecated.

I think the only non-fedora packages I have installed are brave, opera, and flash-plugin.

Can you try an experiment for me? If you don't have an /etc/motd file, create a recognizable one-liner, world-readable. Then log into your system via SSH. Do you see it displayed once, twice or not at all?