Sysadmins - What's in Your MOTD? 176
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 Recently, this has been replaced by a page that announces general University business such as Open weeks, upcoming awards etc.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?"
A quote (Score:3, Interesting)
Notice (Score:3, Interesting)
This is a Department of Defense computer system.
This computer system, including all related equipment, networks, and network devices (specifically Internet access), are provided only for authorized U.S. government use.
DoD Computer systems may be monitored for all lawful purposes, including to ensure that their use is authorized, for management of the system, to facilitate protection against unauthorized access, and to verify security procedures, servivability, and operational security. Monitoring includes active attacks by authorized DoD entities to test or verify the security of this system. During monitoring, information may be examined, recorded, copied, and used for authorized purposes. All information, including personal information, placed on or sent over this system may be monitored. There is no expectation of privacy in any information transmitted in or through this system.
Use of this DoD computer system, authorized or unauthorized, constitutes consent to monitoring of this system. Unauthorized use may be subject to criminal prosecution. Evidence collected during monitoring may be used for administrative, criminal, or other adverse action. Use of this system constitutes consent to monitoring for these purposes.
Sarbox Bites (Score:3, Interesting)
Many of us can't screw with the MOTD because of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act [wikipedia.org], and are stuck with some legal notice that is it is a private system, you need access, blah blah...
I do plan to watch this thread, hoping for some gems to pop-out though for my private systems :)
Our motd is user editable (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Funny you should ask. (Score:3, Interesting)
$ cat
~~~~~~~~~~~~~ UNAUTHORIZED USERS WILL BE KILLED AND EATEN ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Unauthorized access prohibited; all access and activities not explicitly
authorized by [ i ] motion design are unauthorized. All activities are
monitored and logged. There is no privacy on this system. Unauthorized
access and activities or any criminal activity will be reported to
appropriate authorities.
Re:Notice (Score:2, Interesting)
(There is a line of stars here, but the Lameness Filter won't accept it)
NOTICE TO USERS
This is a Federal computer system and is the property of the United
States Government. It is for authorized use only. Users (authorized or
unauthorized) have no explicit or implicit expectation of privacy.
Any or all uses of this system and all files on this system may be
intercepted, monitored, recorded, copied, audited, inspected, and disclosed
to authorized site, Department of Energy, and law enforcement personnel,
as well as authorized officials of other agencies, both domestic and foreign.
By using this system, the user consents to such interception, monitoring,
recording, copying, auditing, inspection, and disclosure at the discretion of
authorized site or Department of Energy personnel.
Unauthorized or improper use of this system may result in administrative
disciplinary action and civil and criminal penalties. By continuing to use
this system you indicate your awareness of and consent to these terms and
conditions of use. LOG OFF IMMEDIATELY if you do not agree to the conditions
stated in this warning.
(There is also a line of *'s here.)
Re:Funny you should ask. (Score:3, Interesting)
FOAD
Heh, nice one, but I think I trump you... At my job I was asked, together with my colleague, to set new root passwords on all our boxes a while ago. We decided to come up with some pretty tough ones to crack, but just for fucks sake leave the password hints in plain sight.
Enter the MOTD... Right now, anyone logging in at one of our servers is greeted with a tongue-in-cheek taunt to try and figure out the root password. The taunt sentence is the basis from which the password is derived. But the process of deriving the password from the taunt sentence alone is pretty hard... For example, "computer" may be represented in the password string as [1+1] (to denote a box that does computations) or 1+1=>[]=>2 to denote a box that accepts computational jobs and outputs results. Or it can just be represented as "c". ;)
The only problem with this scheme: even though I was the one coming up with the taunts and the corresponding passwords, I sometimes have to ring up my colleague when I try to get root on one of the boxes where I rarely use the root account. I made the passwords so hard to derive that the password hint kind of loses its purpose...
Moore's Law "Disk is 99% full - CleanUp" motd gone (Score:5, Interesting)
Historically there were two common contents for motd - fortune, and a note from the administrator saying that the file system was almost full so please clean up your files, and this applied to just about any multi-user server with just about any operating system. Moore's Law has changed this for most systems I've dealt with - disk capacities have been growing rapidly and prices dropping rapidly, and disk drives really are no longer running 99% full except for individuals' PCs that are full of MP3s or videos. Sometimes you'll see messages like that from MS Exchange Mail Server operators who are running shared mailbox servers on expensive fast disks, but otherwise the disk capacity most places finally outpaces user demand.
Unfortunately, bureaucrats acting as amateur lawyers have typically replaced that message with some badly written threatening legalese drivel that has no clue about what the laws actually say; they'd be just as well off with a message that said "The Wizard says: Go away and come back tomorrow!"
who are the diskhogs (Score:5, Interesting)