This is my personal MOTD, I am accepting contributions now from people who are interested in personalizing their MOTD to make it more interesting. My idea here is to create a minimal motd that has the most amount of information about your system in the least amount of space and gets more verbose only when things fail.

My idea for this is to create two column rackmount style layout where each column is 34 characters wide and each unit is 1 line, with 2 spaces between the column this makes the motd 70 characters wide which I found ideal for my personal use.

Here is an illustration of this kind of layout:

[============ 3 unit ============]  [============ 1 unit ============]
[============ 3 unit ============]
[============ 3 unit ============]  [============ 4 unit ============]
                                    [============ 4 unit ============]
[============ 2 unit ============]  [============ 4 unit ============]
[============ 2 unit ============]  [============ 4 unit ============]

[=========================== spanning unit ==========================]

Modules I have created for myself:

• TLS certificate expiration checker
• Systemctl services checker
• APC UPS status indicator
• Hard disk temperature monitor
• ZFS zpool space usage

To run this locally you should run the ./10-local-testing file, the ./10-mini-motd file has absolute paths for /etc/update-motd.d/ for running in production.

Take a look at ./10-mini-motd or ./10-local-testing to see how I set configuration parameters, not everything is configurable yet but I am working on it (any help is welcome).

I would also like to thank everyone whos code I used in this project, people on reddit, other repositories, stack overflow snippets.