Tip: Quite Ubuntu's Login Message

When logging into an Ubuntu server you're normally greeted with the so called "Message of the Day" (motd). This was mostly fine, but lately Canonical has felt the need to advertise their products:

A motd with multiple ads about different products — Like, come on!

Yes, the standard touch ~/.hushlogin of course works, but this removes everything and disables the "Last login" message, which I find useful. No, I think the better approach is to disable specific parts of the message.

Ultimately, this message is controlled by login executing the scripts in the /etc/update-motd.d directory.

Bash

cd /etc/update-motd.d
ls -las

output

total 56
0 drwxr-xr-x 1 root root  410 Jul  8 02:16 .
0 drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 3198 Jul  8 02:14 ..
4 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1220 Oct 15  2021 00-header
4 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1151 Jan  2  2024 10-help-text
4 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root   46 Jul  6 15:28 50-landscape-sysinfo -> /usr/share/landscape/landscape-sysinfo.wrapper
8 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 5023 Oct 15  2021 50-motd-news
4 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root   84 Feb 19  2022 85-fwupd
4 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root  218 Jul 14  2021 90-updates-available
4 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root  296 Apr 30 20:35 91-contract-ua-esm-status
4 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root  558 Apr 18  2022 91-release-upgrade
4 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  165 Feb 19  2021 92-unattended-upgrades
4 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  379 Mar 30  2022 95-hwe-eol
4 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  111 Aug 17  2020 97-overlayroot
4 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  142 Nov 26  2020 98-fsck-at-reboot
4 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  144 Nov 26  2020 98-reboot-required

Silencing these scripts is as simple as removing the execution bit.

This is what I use these days.

Bash

chmod -x \
    10-help-text \
    50-landscape-sysinfo \
    50-motd-news \
    90-updates-available \
    91-contract-ua-esm-status \
    91-release-upgrade