[Bug 805423] Re: pam_motd performance problems

[Steve Langasek]

Thank you for reporting this issue and helping to improve Ubuntu.

I understand your concern about the performance impact; however, we are
not going to change the default behavior of pam_motd in Ubuntu.  There
is consensus that the dynamic motd should be enabled by default, and the
current behavior is the best way to implement this: the cronjob you
refer to was abandoned because it was very wasteful in the common case.

You are right that the ability to log in is more important than
presenting a motd.  If this behavior is a problem for you, there are
several ways that you can disable it:

 - comment out the 'pam_motd' line in /etc/pam.d/sshd if you don't want to display a motd.
 - delete the contents of the /etc/update-motd.d directory.
 - chmod -x the scripts in /etc/update-motd.d that you don't want to run.

Given this existing array of options, I don't think there's anything
further that we can do here short of changing the default behavior,
which we won't do; so marking this bug "wontfix".

** Changed in: pam (Ubuntu)
       Status: New => Won't Fix

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/805423

Title:
  pam_motd performance problems

Status in “pam” package in Ubuntu:
  Won't Fix

Bug description:
  1) lsb_release -rd
  Description:	Ubuntu 10.04.2 LTS
  Release:	10.04

  2)  Installiert: 1.1.1-2ubuntu5.3
    Kandidat: 1.1.1-2ubuntu5.3
    Versions-Tabelle:
   *** 1.1.1-2ubuntu5.3 0
          500 http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ lucid-updates/main Packages
          500 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ lucid-security/main Packages
          100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
       1.1.1-2ubuntu2 0
          500 http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ lucid/main Packages

  3) Login on systems with high load/a lot of io wait via ssh should
  still be possible.

  4) On servers with high load or a lot of io wait login times out,
  because pam_motd does io intensive calculations. This hurts even more
  when using nagios check_by_ssh. There should be a way to use a cron
  job again (like update-motd did). Logging into a system is more
  important than motd.

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