[Bug 1829968] Re: motd [on at least some instances] does not auto-update daily

[Launchpad Bug Tracker]

This bug was fixed in the package base-files - 10.2ubuntu4

---------------
base-files (10.2ubuntu4) eoan; urgency=medium

  * debian/motd-news.timer: Change the timer to use an OnCalendar entry
    instead since neither OnActiveSec nor OnUnitActiveSec accomplished the
    intended goal. (LP: #1829968)

 -- Brian Murray <brian at ubuntu.com>  Fri, 05 Jul 2019 15:30:39 -0700

** Changed in: base-files (Ubuntu Eoan)
       Status: In Progress => Fix Released

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Title:
  motd [on at least some instances] does not auto-update daily

Status in base-files package in Ubuntu:
  Fix Released
Status in base-files source package in Bionic:
  Triaged
Status in base-files source package in Cosmic:
  New
Status in base-files source package in Disco:
  New
Status in base-files source package in Eoan:
  Fix Released

Bug description:
  [Impact]
  motd-news timer is not properly configured and may not run regularly so long running systems will not get an updated motd

  [Test Case]
  The system being tested must have curl installed - base-files does not depend on it because reasons.
  1) Run 'systemctl status mot-news.timer'
  2) Observe that the Trigger section is n/a

  With the version of the package from -proposed the Trigger section
  should instead contain something like the following:

  Trigger: Mon 2019-06-17 11:42:25 PDT; 20min left

  One should also wait to ensure that the trigger actually ran and that
  /var/cache/motd-news has been updated.

  [Regression Potential]
  I can't think of any on the client side as the job wasn't working at all but it may cause extra load on the motd server.

  
  Original Description
  --------------------
  I have a VM running on AWS. It was launched on May 9th:

    $ uptime
     05:26:21 up 12 days,  6:34,  1 user,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
    $ date
    Wed May 22 05:26:24 UTC 2019

  I touched none of the system defaults, and yet the motd has not
  updated automatically.

    $ ls -l /var/cache/motd-news
    -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 May  9 22:53 /var/cache/motd-news

  The systemd timer unit looks like this:

    $ systemctl status motd-news.timer
    ● motd-news.timer - Message of the Day
       Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/motd-news.timer; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
       Active: active (elapsed) since Thu 2019-05-09 22:51:58 UTC; 1 weeks 5 days ago
      Trigger: n/a

    May 09 22:51:58 ip-172-31-23-224 systemd[1]: Started Message of the
  Day.

  If I run /etc/update-motd.d/50-motd-news --force manually, the file
  does update correctly.

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