[SOLVED] (I hope) Re: update or not?

[Dave Howorth]

Nils Kassube wrote:
> That looks like the problem discussed here recently:
> <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-users/2011-May/243736.html>

and that leads to the same bug report as:

Tommy Trussell wrote:
> Also see https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/sysvinit/+bug/634387

which pointed me to the relevant files. So I have

# ls -l /etc/motd*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  13 2010-02-16 15:09 /etc/motd -> /var/run/motd
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 176 2011-05-03 09:30 /etc/motd.tail
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  80 2010-02-16 15:09 /etc/motd.tail.old

/etc/motd.tail.old contains text that doesn't appear in the login
message. I've just deleted that.

/etc/motd.tail contains the second half of the login message. I've
deleted that and then touched it based on comment #7 in the bug report.

/var/run/motd contains the prompt I'm seeing. I deleted that and when I
login again it seems to have regenerated to something sensible, telling
me there are five security updates available. After doing the updates,
it's correctly adjusted the message.

So hopefully the problem is fixed, and I'm hoping it stays fixed thanks
to the zero-length /etc/motd.tail

Thanks everybody!
Cheers, Dave