[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 - 10.1ubuntu2.5

---------------
base-files (10.1ubuntu2.5) bionic; urgency=medium

  * debian/motd-news.timer: Change the timer to use an OnCalendar entry as
    that is correct for oneshot services. (LP: #1829968)

 -- Brian Murray <brian at ubuntu.com>  Mon, 08 Jul 2019 11:43:29 -0700

** Changed in: base-files (Ubuntu Bionic)
       Status: Fix Committed => 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:
  Fix Released
Status in base-files source package in Cosmic:
  Fix Committed
Status in base-files source package in Disco:
  Fix Released
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 motd-news.timer is known to be incorrectly configured because motd-news.services is a one shot service which will not become active. Subsequently, have a timer with OnUnitActiveSec is wrong and the timer will not work reliably. However, because it can work some of the time it is difficult to find a case where the timer always fails so test case will involve only confirming that the new timer is correct.

  1) On a system with curl installed, install the new version of base-files
  2) Run 'systemctl list-timers motd* --all
  3) Confirm that "LEFT" is less than 12 hours (Its less than 24 hours because we don't want people to miss important messages)
  4) Wait until "NEXT" is reached
  5) Confirm that there is another "NEXT" and that the time stamp of /var/cache/motd-news was updated

  [Regression Potential]
  I can't think of any on the client side as the job wasn't working as it was intended 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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