Server Admin : Ubuntu 17.04 thinks it's Ubuntu 12.04???

Yeah, I'm serious, I've taken time tonight to look at the release of Ubuntu Server 17.04, specifically to set up a new mini-server which is to be Core 2 Duo powered and on 24/7 as boot strapper & service strapping server itself.

But, before I run I like to walk, so I set up a 2 core, 1GB RAM VMware machine from the 17.04 ISO... Take a look at the first thing it has presented to me....


Yes, just read that again... I booted the server... and the only action I took was to log in... Welcome to 17.04... All good...

What wait?.. Why am I being warned to upgrade my 12.04?  This is 17.04?

Before I ran around like my last vestiges of hair were on fire, I decided to do a simple test, I've previously found that Ubuntu often goes wondering off on the internet for message of the day (motd) information, so I pulled the network card (virtual) out of the machine.

This results in a long boot time, but you at least know no remote files or services are going to be listing things on your screen...


Five minutes later, I get to see what the system says... From experience I think Canonical have shown some news and up to 80 characters of 40 lines of news, I've never seen that much, but it has been a while since I looked at their motd scripts.

After logging in, I still got the message, however, a fresh install (without any network) didn't show the message, so I believe the install we see here cached something from an online source.

Anyway, taking a look in the /etc/update-motd.d folder, you can see a series of numbered scripts, these are so numbered to allow Canonical, or yourself, to add message of the day scripts, and keep them in the order you see them.


Checking "00-header" we see just the usual log in.

Then "10-help-text" is the three lines about documents, management and support.  I actually add "#" to the start of each of those lines to remove that files actions, I don't delete the file though, just in case.

The next line "50-motd-news", this looks to be the culprit... I'm not even going to look inside the file, because I can see the next file in the folder is "90-updates-available" and I can see in the login that the updates available happen after the message I want to be rid of....

So this strange, confusing, message is in "50-motd-news", I'm going to cut to the chase and kill that file.

And now my login is much neater, I have added a call to "ifconfig" into the 10-help-text, but my login is now clean of this strange message.  But I'm not impressed this has gone on, and I'm going to have to take a look through all these other motd scripts to see what and where my server is going off to.... Hmmm.

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