Fear and Loathing in Debian/Ubuntu (or: who needs /etc/motd)

http://deadmemes.net/2010/10/19/fear-and-loathing-in-debianubuntu-or-who-needs-etcmotd/

by robinhouston • 15 years ago

156 85 15 years ago

Wow. That's a lot of frustration when you could just run

  /bin/rm -f /etc/motd
  touch /etc/motd
  chattr +i /etc/motd

jdpage• 15 years ago

Except for the fact that he didn't know to do that because the documentation was incorrect. Not even merely omitting it -- no, directly contradicting the behaviour. To find out to do as you say, he had to read the Ubuntu-specific patches to the source code of the package. That is broken.

rdtsc2• 15 years ago

The man page is outdated. "Fuck you Ubuntu, I am switching my OS and bitching to the whole world about."

Then when they are in BSD, or Arch, it will be "Fuck you Arch" you don't have this man page right, I am switching OS again and bitching to the whole world about it.

Yeah I don't hear a lot of people complain about Arch and BSD and other "canonical" *nix systems. But it not because they are flawless, but because few people are using them compared to RHEL,CentOS and Ubuntu flavors.

Another way to look at it, if motd man page is what people are now mainly complaining about when it comes to Ubuntu, Ubuntu is doing great.

peterwwillis2• 15 years ago

It's more of a standard method you can employ on any Linux operating system regardless of documentation. But I get it, it's frustrating when you don't know how to use your computer.

jff2• 15 years ago

The Ubuntu man page he quoted specifically said that /etc/motd was a symlink, which should be all the info you need to know "oh, just gotta remove the symlink and put in a regular file".

Until the next update, of course!

shtylman• 15 years ago

This post just stems from the fact the user did not know how to do something. This has very little to do with an updated motd or the very unrelated bzr branch he had to get. Don't like it? use something else. The time you wasted writing this post was probly greater than the time wasted finding the solution.

callahad• 15 years ago

That seems a bit ad hominem. The author, despite the excited tone, points out numerous legitimate failings of documentation and convention in Ubuntu.

Cloven• 15 years ago

This could possibly be the dumbest reply ever on HN.

The motd file, by convention, is displayed whenever you log in to a Unix box. It has been this way for longer than you have been alive.

There is no question of 'use something else'. There is no app store for alternatives to /etc/motd. There is no dialog box that pops up that asks you what alternative to motd you would like to see.

The standard unified method for determining what a system file is composed of is called 'man'. This has also been around since long before you were alive. The author demonstrated correctly through the use of this tool that the ubuntu system for displaying the motd is (a) needlessly overcomplicated, (b) totally broken, and maybe most importantly (c) at odds with its documentation.

Please log out of the internet.

freehunter6• 15 years ago

This could possibly be the dumbest reply ever on HN.

>There is no question of 'use something else'.

Yes, there _is_ an alternative. It's called use something else. Use a distro that doesn't change. Use a BSD, use Slackware, use RHEL/CentOS. Don't use a bleeding edge distro that is best known for change if what you really want is the same thing you've seen since before you were born.

If you don't like how Ubuntu does it, don't use Ubuntu.

cbs3• 15 years ago

There is no question of 'use something else'.

So, what you're saying is that this new motd system is some seriously disruptive technology? Good on those ubuntu kids, showing us all how its done.

pnathan3• 15 years ago

No, the core problem was that man motd did not help tell him how to do something. That's what the man pages are supposed to do... man motd on my Oneiric system still says nothing about this lovely little 'feature'.

Not to mention the questionable desirability of stacking complexity upon a very simple goal...

cbs3• 15 years ago

Did your little hissy fit feel good? I hope so, because other than "software should never ever change, doubly so if the documentation isn't updated" I got absolutely nothing from that post.

An update changed something, the documentation didn't have the answer so you checked with the source. Welcome to linux. Actually, welcome to the world of software.

Did you at least submit a bug report?

Karunamon2• 15 years ago

>I hope so, because other than "software should never ever change, doubly so if the documentation isn't updated" I got absolutely nothing from that post.

Seeing as how I share, almost verbatim, the author's rage, allow me to break it down into a sentence or two:

What possible benefit was there from overcomplicating the bloody MOTD file? I don't see anything but complexity for complexity's sake.

cbs3• 15 years ago

What possible benefit was there from overcomplicating the bloody MOTD file?

I dunno, but does it really matter? If the motd mattered anything to me, I would have been aware of the change.

I was blindsided by this change too and one day, like years ago, I noticed that the motd wasn't working as I expected and reset itself. I did (something to the effect of) this:

    $ ls -l /etc/motd*
    lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 13 2008-09-23 21:44 /etc/motd -> /var/run/motd
    -rw-r--r-- 1 root root  0 2009-06-14 15:01 /etc/motd.tail

Then I thought "oh I see what they did there", dropped a banner in motd.tail and moved on with life. Wow, yeah, 2 and a half years ago. Didn't care then, still don't care now.

_ea1k• 15 years ago

Didn't these changes make the addition of dynamic content to the MOTD really trivial? That seems compatible with Ubuntu's mission to me.

It sounds to me like this whole rant could have been replaced with a bug report on the documentation in Launchpad.

nknight4• 15 years ago

I happen to like being informed, when I SSH into my server, that there are some package updates available.

I happen to like a quick status check popping up for me to either look at or just ignore at my pleasure, especially since 99% of the time, the first thing I do when I log into a server is do exactly the sort of status check available in the Ubuntu MOTD.

There are benefits. That you don't consider them worthwhile is fine, but you don't need to go apoplectic about it.

cinch• 15 years ago

yep. why make it complicated when one could, for example, the admin can simply overwrite the motd from /etc/rc.local, instead of this symlink + motd.tail + regenerate at login/boot?

davvid• 15 years ago

Welcome to linux. Actually, welcome to the world of software.

This attitude is not helpful and please don't "blame" it on Linux.

fader• 15 years ago

> This attitude is not helpful

That may be the most amusingly misdirected statement ever considering the inane rant that is under discussion.

freehunter6• 15 years ago

I'm getting sick of people complaining that Ubuntu keeps changing things. That's what Ubuntu does! They've done that since the beginning! Oh, they've changed the software manager, oh they've changed desktop environments, oh they changed the theme color... stop complaining and switch to something else.

If you're looking for stability and steadfastness, you probably shouldn't be using a distro with a 6 month major release cycle. Things change, things get broken, and if you don't know that about Ubuntu by now, you're doing it wrong.

alxp• 15 years ago

Just change the documentation at the same time as you change a feature. That's all the author expected. Not doing that makes you a bad developer.

freehunter6• 15 years ago

Maybe so, but issues like this are common in Ubuntu-land. Some people like that. Some don't. They're well-known for releasing new features that are broken and poorly documented. Usually they are fixed in the next release. This happens all the time, and complaining about it every time just gets old.

Dobbs• 15 years ago

Ubuntu/Debian have a very nasty habit of breaking the "principle of least astonishment".

Things like why isn't my '/etc/cron.daily/blah.sh' script not running? I'll give you a hint its the period. Good luck realizing that if you come from any other Unix out there.

There is a need for progress but breaking everything just to try something new (pulseaudio, unity, and so on) is not progress just frustration.

ernesth• 15 years ago

Debian has a habit of having manpages. To realize the peculiarity of cron.daily, you just have to read them.

Ubuntu on the other hand pushes changes before documenting them.

bitwize• 15 years ago

Scumbag Debian making Unix not work right since the 90s.

I can't tell you how many straightforward Unix configuration things -- network interfaces, resolv.conf, initscripts, etc. just plain can't be edited on a Debian or Ubuntu system except through Debian-specific tools because if you do, the Debian-spoecific tools will clobber your changes and/or other Debian-specific things won't work right.

This is why I use Arch. It's like everything I could want out of a Linux: the simplicity of Slackware, the completeness of Debian (if not quite as huge as Debian without the AUR), the rolling release schedule of Gentoo.

jeltz• 15 years ago

What does Debian have to do with update-motd? As far as I know Debian does not do anything particularly funky with the motd. On my Debian testing computer it is a symlink to /var/run/motd which is a static file generated at boot.

This specific instance of pointless complexity seems to be almost only the work of of Ubuntu.

pyre3• 15 years ago

The parent is probably using this as an excuse to rail on things like the auto-generated config files that can't be edited directly (e.g. the grub/grub2 config files).

imurray3• 15 years ago

I regularly have to recompile a couple of Ubuntu packages after excising undocumented junk. I really should submit a patch with a c̶o̶n̶f̶i̶g̶ ̶f̶i̶l̶e̶ g̶c̶o̶n̶f̶ dconf option that does the same. But for now I haven't found the time and tell myself that at least I can comment out the junk code and recompile on Ubuntu.

Incidentally, to disable all chatter at login (as documented in man login, and it actually still works in Ubuntu 11.10):

    touch ~/.hushlogin

fjarlq• 15 years ago

By the way, your attempt at striking out "config file gconf" looks bad on Chrome running on Windows 7 -- every letter is followed by a box. Looks fine on OSX Chrome though.

Tyr42• 15 years ago

Boxes for Opera on OSX here.

VMG• 15 years ago

also fine on Chromium/Arch

imurray3• 15 years ago

Thanks. It works in Ubuntu (Chrome or Firefox).

Playing with: http://ipinfo.info/netrenderer/index.php it seems that Internet Explorer won't display the strikeout characters because the font on HN is set to Verdana, which doesn't have the combining character. If I create a page without specifying the font, it works fine.

I have Verdana on my system, but the browsers and font libraries I have installed mean that the glyph is taken from another font when one is missing. I'm surprised Windows 7 browsers don't do the same. Or maybe you don't have the glyph in any font, which would also be disappointing.

Of course, a real webpage would use <strike> or CSS, and strikeouts are usually poor typography anyway, except as part of lame jokes. But other unicode combining-characters can be of real use.

dredmorbius• 15 years ago

Color me mildly unsure of footing, but wouldn't Debian's policy restriction of the system automatically overwriting user-modified files turn this issue into a bug?

alexchamberlain3• 15 years ago

Not if it is documented to be a symlink and the user should edit motd.tail instead.

ChuckMcM• 15 years ago

As with many things Linux there are a lot of cultures that feed into it. And the author's frustration on the implementation of motd serve as a reasonable exemplar of this.

There are two (maybe three) nominal 'people' in this particular circle of hell, one is the developer who originally felt that the message of the day should reflect something important without having to actually edit it every day. One is the guy who wants the motd to have something different in it. Culturally the first guy is the 'lazy' type (in quotes because it reflects the culture of "hey I've got a computer here the more work it does the less I do" which is a popular meme in system administrator circles and elsewhere) and the other is the 'KISS' type (where KISS is the 'keep it simple stupid' type of person who oftens stresses simplicity over mechanism. The third (perhaps absent) person is the 'systems' person/distro owner who imposes an implicit design guideline on the system by virtue of the changes they accept or don't, commit or don't into what becomes the final product. In the kernel tree this is clearly Linus but in other parts of the system it isn't always clear whether or not there even is someone in this role.

Underlying this I find a strong sense of frustration at changes that are made to 'small, meaningless' parts of the system when large parts sit there on fire. Of course not everyone can fix bugs in EXT4 or memory leaks in long running daemons, everyone needs to start somewhere, and sometimes changing the colors around in ls(1) so that the default is unreadable on your favorite color scheme is probably some 'starter project' of someone who wants to become a bigger part of the solution.

It is the experience you get when you use Linux, and that experience is an artifact of how Linux is created. So hating it isn't particularly productive, although like UNIX-haters before it rooted in much the same arguments.

pnathan3• 15 years ago

It just didn't have to happen, though.

Without debating the (IMO very questionable) utility of changing motd behavior, or the (IMO too sloppy) change management of Ubuntu...

A three-line update to man motd would have solved the problem, and the motd maintainer didn't do that, and whoever accepted the patch didn't do that, and now anyone who wants to figure what the Penguin is going on is going to have to google for it and, hopefully, find the answer before they hit the "download source" rabbit hole.

All because of a few sentences.

Yeah, at home I don't use Ubuntu directly anymore. =)

eridius2• 15 years ago

The manpage said:

> On Debian GNU/Linux this file is a symbolic link pointing to /var/run. The contents of this file are regenerated upon every system boot based on the contents of /etc/motd.tail.

The fundamental problem here is the blog author didn't realize that `echo foo > /etc/motd` wouldn't work, even though the manpage did, in fact, inform him that /etc/motd was just a symlink to something that gets regenerated at boot time. I'm not really sure what the manpage could have done to make it more obvious what his problem was.

Now, it's possible the manpage is out of date, and that it's regenerated via some other mechanism than /etc/motd.tail. I don't know (since I don't use Debian, or even Linux in general). But the salient point here was that it points to a file that gets regenerated at boot time.

*Edit: On second look, it sounds like this change makes it regenerate on each login, not just each boot. I can understand why someone might think that `echo foo > /etc/motd` followed by a login would then print 'foo', given the current manpage. But they certainly wouldn't expect that it would still print 'foo' after a reboot unless the break the symlink (and breaking the symlink fixes the author's complaint).

angusgr2• 15 years ago

In the kernel tree this is clearly Linus but in other parts of the system it isn't always clear whether or not there even is someone in this role.

In the case of Ubuntu I think this definitely happens, although AFAIK the high-level design discussions & decisions largely happen behind closed doors (happy to be corrected on that point.)

In this case I wouldn't be surprised if there was a requirement/design decision to have the system explicitly remind the user if there were pending package/security updates and also prompting you about available new distro versions. At least, on default Ubuntu systems the motd does these things and has for some time - and it feels to me like a "by design" thing.

Why they rolled it from an update-motd standalone package to a built-in part of the pam module, I have no inkling over, though.

zokier• 15 years ago

Here is the bug discussing inclusion of update-motd: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/update-motd/+bug/2...

smlacy• 15 years ago

sudo apt-get remove update-motd

imurray3• 15 years ago

Not in Ubuntu 11.10:

% apt-cache show update-motd

...Description-en: superceded by pam_motd in libpam-modules

...The functionality formerly provided by this package is now integrated into pam_motd, in libpam-modules.

docgnome• 15 years ago

Maybe I'm confused but on my Debian system this works _exactly_ as expected. Yes /etc/motd is a symlink to /var/run/motd and removing said symlink, or replacing it with something causes either the new message to show or there to be no motd. Is the author just confusing Debian and Ubuntu or am I missing something? Why do people keep doing this? Just because Ubuntu behaves in a specific way does not mean that Debian behaves the same.

dlitz2• 15 years ago

It also works as expected on Ubuntu. The main difference is that /var/run/motd is generated on each login, rather than only on boot, but that's irrelevant to the author's problem.

angusgr2• 15 years ago

EDIT: OK, I misunderstood. That paragraph is there even in the original blog post, but the author didn't pick up how to get their desired behaviour until they read the code. Also, there's the "boot time regen" vs "login time regen" change between Debian & Ubuntu.

It's hard to say in retrospect how obvious that clause is, but there's no reason the original author couldn't have raised a bug with Debian saying they didn't understand the man page, and can Debian please add another sentence saying "To have a static motd, delete the /etc/motd symlink and replace it with a plain text file." Ranting won't make it better, but a polite suggestion might.

Ditto raising a suggestion with Ubuntu about replacing "boot time" with "login time" in their manpage.

---

Except from the motd man page on Ubuntu oneiric:

On Debian GNU/Linux this file is a symbolic link pointing to /var/run. The contents of this file are regenerated upon every system boot based on the contents of /etc/motd.tail.

I can see the original author's frustration, but I got to the end of the post and thought "why didn't he submit a bug report mentioning the motd man page needed updating?"

Yes, this was a mistake in Ubuntu. Nevertheless, it didn't seem like one that the Ubuntu developers would be unwilling or incapable of fixing. In fact, lo and behold, it has been fixed!

I can see there's a broader point here in general, regarding the philosophy of "change vs not-change." However, that point doesn't seem to necessitate quite so much nerdrage.

Someone2• 15 years ago

"On Debian GNU/Linux this file is a symbolic link pointing to /var/run. The contents of this file"

That second 'this file' is ambiguous. I think the grammatically/semantically/whateveryoucallitally best interpretation (by a tiny margin) would be that both 'this file' would talk about the same file, but I am not sure, and I think that, in the real world, that is the incorrect interpretation.

albertzeyer• 15 years ago

If you want to have a static /etc/motd and if you see that /etc/motd is a symlink to something in /var/run, wouldn't it be the straightforward way to just make /etc/motd a regular file instead?

Despite that, I wonder a bit, who is really manually editing that file by hand?

jff2• 15 years ago

Many employers require a usage notice in the motd, stating that this computer is public property, unauthorized use will be prosecuted, blah blah. So I have to edit motd by hand, or at least edit the motd in some fashion.

baughj2• 15 years ago

Author here, I thought I'd respond to a few things.

I tend to write posts on my blog in a particular style. It tends to run towards bombastic, deliberately, for effect. My point with this entire post was more how something simple can unravel into a deep hole, and how, in particular, I hate the way Ubuntu does many, many things. It's not that I hate change: I hate non-obvious change.

I often don't write posts as a systems administrator might approach something (my main complaints about honeycomb, as an example, were more focused on how an average user might interact with it as opposed to, say, me - I was just annoyed), and I tend to like to turn over rocks and see what is underneath. My post serves to relay an experience, rather than plead for help, or whine, if that makes any sense at all.

I should have titled the post better, admittedly. And for the record, I don't hate Ubuntu. Or Unix. Or Linux. I've been using them in various iterations for fifteen years. Try not to read so much into a rant written mostly to amuse a few of my friends.

unwind• 15 years ago

I guess the root confusion is whether or not you expected the equivalent of echo "foo" > /etc/motd to replace the symlink with a new file containing "foo", or not.

Or if the symlink semantics just weren't something you considered at this point, which lead you to keep hunting.

baughj2• 15 years ago

The post is more about having the reasonable expectation that editing /etc/motd is sufficient to change the motd. It isn't. It's not that I didn't notice it's a symlink, or that I couldn't have just removed the symlink. The issue is more that a reasonable expectation unfolds exponentially into (what I consider to be) a surprising amount of ridiculousness. That is the point of the rabbit hole post.

alexchamberlain3• 15 years ago

It amused me slightly you hadn't "ls"d /etc/motd and discovered the symlink straight away (of course, ls is aliased to ls -la)

Fear and Loathing in Debian/Ubuntu (or: who needs /etc/motd)

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