motd.tail renamed itself to motd.tail.old in all of my servers at the same time

[Dustin Kirkland]

On Thu, Feb 16, 2012 at 4:19 AM, Alberto Fuentes
<alberto.fuentes at qindel.com> wrote:
> suddenly all of my servers stopped showing /etc/motd.tail i noticed in some
> of the it got renamed to motd.tail.old... after a few minutes, it started
> working again.
>
> I googled a little bit the issue without luck...
>
> Does anybody know what happened?

On Thu, Feb 16, 2012 at 4:19 AM, Alberto Fuentes
<alberto.fuentes at qindel.com> wrote:
> suddenly all of my servers stopped showing /etc/motd.tail i noticed in some
> of the it got renamed to motd.tail.old... after a few minutes, it started
> working again.
>
> I googled a little bit the issue without luck...
>
> Does anybody know what happened?

It's possible that you upgraded your base-files package from a version
older than 5.0.0ubuntu13.  In its postinst script, it does:
...
if [ "$1" = "configure" ] && [ "$2" != "" ]; then
  if [ -f /etc/motd.tail ]; then
    if dpkg --compare-versions "$2" lt-nl 5.0.0ubuntu13; then
      # motd.tail is no longer generated by this package;
      # rather, the sysadmin can use motd.tail to append
      # text to the pam_motd dynamically generated motd
      mv -f /etc/motd.tail /etc/motd.tail.old
      # Clear out old MOTD, will be regenerated on next login
      rm -f /var/run/motd
    fi
  fi
...
fi

-- 
:-Dustin

Dustin Kirkland
Ubuntu Core Developer