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Attractive motd (message of the day)

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I’ve been looking for methods to broadcast message on the system (motd-message of the day) to all users on a particular server everytime they log on (in which the message must be as stand out as possible, otherwise the message of the day will be ignored!!). The motd that I’ve been broadcasting all the while does not really attract users and that delays some of my work. I use vi editor to write the message and broadcast it through system file (etc/motd). Is there any ways that I can make my message very attractive. For your information, I’m using the HP-UX Operating System version 10.20 and am using posix shell.

Pls advice.

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Attractive motd (message of the day)

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I think you need to do something that the users will look forward to seeing. Otherwise, what ever you do will be ignored. Why don’t you try including a short joke (which would have to change often enough that everyone would be looking out for it when they log in? Years ago, when we had SunOS 4.1.3, there was a command called fortune. Our users loved to read the messages that fortune produced.

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I’ve found a lot of users will ignore it no matter what you do but we tried some escape sequences to produce highlighting or blinking – maybe that would help.

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You are very limited with /etc/motd since it is a simple cat(1) of a file. Other than providing a border and changing the appearance (very frequently), you have a couple of options: 1) you can write a shell script that uses tput(1) to leverage stand-out mode (reverse video) and blinking characters, but you will need to invoke the script from the appropriate environment file, or 2) leverage news(1) (this is desireable if you want to be able to verify that an individual user read a particular news item (the news item itself is again a character file, but .news_time in the $HOME will tell you the last time the user read articles); you will need to add a news(1) command to your environment file to notify users of news items.

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What about placing an image before the message using only text characters?
_ _
(_) (_) Of course, you will
/ have to let your
(_ imagination fly.
\ /
\___/

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We use fortune. It’s free. You will offend some people with the fortune database. However you can seed it with your own companies factoids, interesting “on this day last year such and such happened…” and clean jokes of your own. One thing we have done is make the fortune optional. We have a cronjob that creates the text file /usr/local/etc/qotd. This is displayed to all who want to see the qotd. They run ‘qotd’ to toggle display of the qotd on and off.

The toggle qotd script:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
# What is the point of using perl if you don’t use it!
$file = (getpwuid($<))[7]."/.qotd"; if (-e $file) { print "Quote of the day has been turned off. \n"; unlink($file); } else { print "Quote of the day has been turned on.\n"; open(FILE,">>$file”);
close(FILE);
}

The line to put in your system profile:

test -f $HOME/.qotd && /bin/cat -s /usr/local/etc/qotd

Have fun,

huba@uidaho.edu

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You could try writing a tcl perl script to pop a GUI box up on all the users X displays in the morning (using cronjob) or upon login using the login script. And then use some nice red writing.

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If you want to stay with a simple file (as opposed to change startup scripts and run fancy programs/scripts that do blinking, highlighting, and perhaps force users to acknowledge the message), you have little options other than using ASCII graphic drawings, much like the 😉 type. You can repeat the message in the files /etc/issue (getty), /etc/copyright (all) and /etc/motd (all) which are displayed at various points in the login sequence (depending on login method).

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Outside of /etc/motd, I’ve been in places that customize /etc/issue and /etc/gettydefs to have custom messages.

Another thing we did with users that were logging in via X-Windows is use xmessage (there are probably better varients now) to pop up a display window they had to “ok” to get out of.

As pointed out in other responses, if they all have ansi terminals, then ANSI control characters for blinking, reverse video, etc. would alert them. If they don’t then you’ll have to modify the login steps to check and choose the appropriate display.

If you want to force them to read it, modify the login procedures to force them to aknowledge the motd display before login will continue. This can result in some problems if not done correctly.

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