Empty line on ssh login

Question

I have just received the login information for a new vServer running Debian 5.0 (amd64). Whenever I log in I get an empty line:

markus@neon ~ $ ssh flour

markus@flour ~

I don't know where this line comes from and I don't want it to be there. To debug this I put foo in /etc/issue.net and set the Banner option in /etc/ssh/sshd_config accordingly. Then I put echo bar in my .bash_profile as the first line. The result is this:

markus@neon ~ $ ssh flour
foo

bar
markus@flour ~ $

I don't know which files are used between the Banner and .bash_profile. Could someone give me a hint, please?

Answer 1

If PrintMotd is set to yes (or is commented out - yes is the default), I would guess that there's a blank line in /etc/motd. Debian by default has quite a verbose MOTD, and it sounds like someone's edited the file and deleted all the lines by hand, leaving the last line empty.