ubuntu server: SSH banner telling to update packages but nothing to update

Question

When I connect to my Ubuntu 10.04.2 LTS server I get the following banner:

25 packages can be updated.
15 updates are security updates.

However if I run package upgrades/updates nothing comes up:

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get upgrade
...
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

After doing some research I found that issuing apt-get dist-upgrade could help but it makes no difference.

Any help is welcome.

Answer 1

That banner you're talking about is called MOTD (Message Of The Day). It appears to be a bug which can be work-arounded by deleting the /etc/motd.tail file.