Sysadmins - What's in Your MOTD?

permaculture asks: "This is a 'knowledge management' issue, on a University network. For many years we've had a network 'Message of the Day' that appears when any network user logs in. MOTD lists planned service outages for maintenance, progress on current issues, upcoming holidays, and other items that affect network users. Recently, this has been replaced by a page that announces general University business such as Open weeks, upcoming awards etc. There's a link on the page to the network MOTD that used to greet every user immediately after login. Does your network have a 'Message of the Day' that appears at login? Is it a Corporate business page, entirely related to network services, or something else entirely?"

Funny you should ask.

[grub]

I was just thinking of upgrading mine. It currently reads:

[grub@shrubbery grub]$ cat /etc/motd

"Ask Slashdot" has reached a new low!

[grub@shrubbery grub]$

Message of the *day*

[PayPaI]

[ben@bees ~]$ ls -l /etc/motd
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 138 Jul 28 2000 /etc/motd

Re:Funny you should ask.

[duplicate-nickname]

/me is confused

C:\>cat /etc/motd
'cat' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.
 
C:\>

From Mail/Calendaring server

[apenzott]

Events on calendar are closer than they appear.

We have a new MOTD

[Bromskloss]

It's a bit scary, but just this day our MOTD got changed to "We are the Borg. Resistance is futile.". :-/

Message of the eon

[ZiZ]

DoublePlusBSD 0.0.0 (BIGBROTHER) #1: Wed Feb 29 04:20:00 GMT 1984

      not entirely working in your best interests
                            -- since 1984 --

Access to and use of this server is restricted to those
activities expressly permitted by the system administion
staff.  If you're not sure if it's allowed, DON'T DO IT.

What you get when you run file shares....

[Rydia]

>cat /etc/motd
Benden Weyr: Now with 200% more Space Elf-related program activity!

Re:Funny you should ask.

[Richard Steiner]

Wow... I get a completely different response:

>cat /etc/motd
DATA IGNORED - IN CONTROL MODE

I hate stupid users.

[__aaxwdb6741]

Rule #1: Do not speak about dienub
Rule #2: Do not speak about dienub
Rule #3: Whatever it was in that cool movie
Rule #4: If I dislike your behaviour on this server, I will purge your
                account, and publish your entire home directory in a public IRC
                channel.
                This includes, nonexclusively, sending global messages, using retarded
                exploits (Both against this and other servers), ban evasion, etc.

Too many faulty login attempts will get you banned by DenyHosts. Generate a
fucking keypair and use it for authentication. Passwords are insecure.

Sincerely,
Your friendly BOFH.

inappropriate motds

[Anonymous Coward]

Boss's work Credit Card info -- Doubles as an IDS
Company gossip
Ascii porn
random line from salaries.xls
latest /. headline
grep $bossip /var/log/squid/access.log | tail -n 5

Re:Notice

[Tsunayoshi]

Dude, I am reporting your Slashdot ID to DISA since you obviously hacked my server and stole my MOTD.

<disclaimer>I am a DOD sysadmin</disclaimer>

Re:Mine is ...

[plover]

One day one of the guys left his terminal logged in as root. I edited it from a call to fortune to instead be:

echo He who forgets the past is doomed to repeat it.

Of course, once he found out who did it, he changed my the folder on my user account from /usr/~john to /dev/floppy until I went begging his forgiveness. I didn't do it again.

Re:Our motd is user editable

[Anonymous Coward]

His parent's basement. He's got split-personality syndrom.

Re:Mine is ...

[dknj]

at my last job, i allowed consultants to fuck with each other if they left their machines open for abuse (i.e. leave a root window open or an administrator account unlocked on their computer). one consultant set his root password to abc123, another consultant found out and started abusing his machine. the hacked consultant came crying to me for justice and i threatened to fire him if he didn't find and fix his security flaws. since then he has become a bit more security-minded.

MOTD

[Ryan Amos]

All your bash are belong to us.

Re:We have a new MOTD

[r3jjs]

We are the electrons.

Resistance is voltage / current.

Re:Warning Mac user

[AFCArchvile]

I tweaked mine a bit:

Somebody spilled Macintosh in my BSD!

A nice simple one

[Trogre]

It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

My previous one...

[Kronovohr]

This was what mine was before I upgraded:

Dis beez my box.
It don' be real fast.
But if you fuck wit it,
I be kickin' yo ass.
        -- Management