MOTD debian - is this ever changed by an update?

Question

Is this ever changed automatically by a system update?

I'm just wondering as I set a 'hilarious' one for a personal server off rackspace cloud, and it seems to have been deleted.

Answer 1

See /etc/init.d/bootlogs

Specifically this line

# Update motd
uname -snrvm > /var/run/motd
[ -f /etc/motd.tail ] && cat /etc/motd.tail >> /var/run/motd

Meaning you should put your changes to motd in /etc/motd.tail otherwise its going to get overwritten on boot.

Answer 2

It might be interesting to add that editing /etc/motd.tail is not enough, the above snippet must be executed to update /etc/motd, the system only updates it on reboot (well, how often do you reboot your servers?)

Just out of lazyness, and because my server has no load anyways, I update /etc/motd every minute by using cron to execute exactly the code mentioned above.