MOTD printing twice with "PrintMotd no"

Question

I looked at other posts on here but none seemed to help. Whether I set PrintMotd to "no" or "yes" in the etc/ssh/ directory under sshd_config as long as I have a "motd" file under in etc/ it gets printed twice.

Is there a different file that I need to edit that got messed up somewhere?

Solution 1

As a fix I commented out session optional pam_motd.so in the sshd file which is found under etc/pam.d.

If there is a more proper solution to replace mine please post it as well.

Solution 2

For me it was two places causing motd to be displayed twice:

1) pam.d & 2) sshd itself

To start fixing it:

~> cd /etc/pam.d/ ~> grep -i motd *

and then editing /etc/pam.d/sshd (may differ from version to version so confirm with grep output) and hash out these two lines:

session optional pam_motd.so motd=/run/motd.dynamic session optional pam_motd.so noupdate

My /etc/ssh/sshd_config also had #PrintMotd=yes (default is yes so it was active even if it was #'d out)

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In the end I set /etc/ssh/sshd_config MOTD option to PrintMotd=no (not removed the # and set to no to replace the default) and enabled the /etc/pam.d/sshd motd lines so the /etc/ssh/sshd_config option printlastlog=yes will print the last login information after the pam.d motd is displayed.

Pam will also use the options in /etc/update-motd.d/ to customise the /etc/motd as well which sshd will not do as it will simply display what is already there.