Unix Message of the Day

I noticed that every time I ssh'd into one of the servers I have hosted at http://www.a2hosting.com, I was greeted with the same message.

There is a Quick installer available in /usr/sbin named quickinstaller.sh. It will give you the
option of installing a LAMP or LAPP install to help get you started.

You can run it by executing the following as root:

/usr/sbin/quickinstaller.sh

This is all very helpful information, of course, but I have now seen it several thousand times. I finally asked the question: "I wonder if I can make it go away".

It turns out, this is simply the Unix message of the day, stored in /etc/motd. Now, there are ways to suppress noticing logins (a bad idea from a security perspective) or to hush the login message (creating an empty ~/.hushlogin file) but I decided to simply edit the message of the day to something more applicable to me — namely, to remind me where I just ssh'd.

sudo vi /etc/motd

Welcome to RocKeeper!

Hooray! No more quickinstaller message! (But thank you for that option, A2 Hosting, even if I am not using it.)