Configuration

Message of the day

The contents of /etc/motd are displayed after a successful login, just before the login shell is executed.

Ubuntu

Ubuntu introduced the update-motd framework, by which the motd is dynamically assembled from a collection of scripts at login.

Executable scripts in /etc/update-motd.d/* are executed by pam_motd as the root user at each login, and this information is concatenated in /var/run/motd.