Overview
Customizing Server Welcome Message
I recently set up a home server as a small project to keep me sane during the COVID-19 social distancing period. I have been slowly customizing it to my liking to have a fully functional server that I can host files on and to learn a thing or two about Linux Sys Admin tasks.
I wanted to customize the text that gets printed out when you first log into a server. This is what the Compute Canada log in screen looks like on the Beluga server.
After a quick Google search, it turns out that this is called the “Message of The Day” or “motd” for short and is stored in a file (/etc/motd).
So I created the text I wanted to print out: “WELCOME TO ChezHD”; ChezHD being the server name (HD are our family name initials).
I had written a small python script, PicAscii, a few years ago that takes in text and draws it in ASCII characters, so I used it to draw my text.
wget -O picascii.zip https://github.com/rdali/PicAscii/archive/master.zip
unzip picascii.zip
cd PicAscii-master
python ./picascii.py -s 'WELCOME TO ChezHD' -t "@" -d "#"
I copied the resulting text and pasted in /etc/motd on my home server.
nano /etc/motd
#paste text, save and close
This is the result when I log in now:
Note: You have to be an admin or super user to be able to edit certain system files. If you are a regular user on a system, you will not be able to edit the motd file.
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