Re: motd handling in jessie

[Cameron Norman <camerontnorman@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Jan 25, 2015 at 11:45 AM, Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> wrote:
> Michael Biebl <biebl@debian.org> writes:
>
>> Why run this on every boot?
>
> The main thing that you want to be up-to-date are things like the running
> kernel version, and you have no other good way of detecting that, I don't
> think.
>
> It's not like this stuff takes very long to run, and it will happily
> parallelize.
>
>> If the update-motd.d interface is supposed to also show information like
>> list of outdated packages, etc, wouldn't some other mechanism to trigger
>> an update, be better.
>
> What trigger do you have in mind that would detect that you just rebooted
> the system into that new kernel that you installed six weeks ago but never
> used?
>
>> I suggested a cron job, but maybe there are better ways, like apt hooks,
>> dpkg triggers, etc.
>
> A cron job is strictly worse than running it at boot in every metric that
> I can think of.

Well we can do both. If these update-motd scripts actually differ in
their result day by day, and the server is only rebooted maybe once a
week (if not less often), then running them once at boot is not
enough.

So to have them up to date in that respect, you need to either have a
cron job or invoke the update-motd scripts on every login. Invoking
them on every login could make it difficult to access bogged down
servers.

Regards,
--
Cameron Norman