[Bug 1829968] Re: motd [on at least some instances] does not auto-update daily

[Brian Murray]

I booted multiple virtual machines to see if I could discover a
difference among releases and observed the following:

bdmurray at clean-cosmic-amd64:~$ systemctl status motd-news.timer
● motd-news.timer - Message of the Day
   Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/motd-news.timer; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
   Active: active (waiting) since Wed 2019-06-12 15:40:07 PDT; 9min ago
  Trigger: Thu 2019-06-13 04:29:53 PDT; 12h left

Jun 12 15:40:07 clean-cosmic-amd64 systemd[1]: Started Message of the
Day.

bdmurray at clean-bionic-amd64:~$ systemctl status motd-news.timer
● motd-news.timer - Message of the Day
   Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/motd-news.timer; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
   Active: active (elapsed) since Wed 2019-06-12 15:41:33 PDT; 8min ago
  Trigger: n/a

Jun 12 15:41:33 clean-bionic-amd64 systemd[1]: Started Message of the
Day.

bdmurray at clean-disco-amd64:~$ systemctl status motd-news.timer
● motd-news.timer - Message of the Day
   Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/motd-news.timer; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
   Active: active (elapsed) since Wed 2019-06-12 15:42:11 PDT; 7min ago
  Trigger: n/a

Jun 12 15:42:11 clean-disco-amd64 systemd[1]: Started Message of the
Day.

My Disco desktop:
[  3:37PM 11006 ]  [ bdmurray at impulse:~/source-trees/daisy/trunk ]
 $ systemctl status motd-news.timer
● motd-news.timer - Message of the Day
   Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/motd-news.timer; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
   Active: active (waiting) since Mon 2019-06-03 16:01:27 PDT; 1 weeks 1 days ago
  Trigger: Wed 2019-06-12 22:26:26 PDT; 6h left

Jun 03 16:01:27 impulse systemd[1]: Started Message of the Day.

My Bionic server:
[  3:43PM 5419 ]  [ bdmurray at bizarro:/tmp ]
 $ systemctl status motd-news.timer
● motd-news.timer - Message of the Day
   Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/motd-news.timer; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
   Active: active (elapsed) since Mon 2019-05-06 09:17:35 PDT; 1 months 6 days ago
  Trigger: n/a

Warning: Journal has been rotated since unit was started. Log output is
incomplete or unavailable.

There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason as to which systems
received the Trigger.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1829968

Title:
  motd [on at least some instances] does not auto-update daily

Status in base-files package in Ubuntu:
  Triaged
Status in base-files source package in Bionic:
  Triaged
Status in base-files source package in Eoan:
  Triaged

Bug description:
  I have a VM running on AWS. It was launched on May 9th:

    $ uptime
     05:26:21 up 12 days,  6:34,  1 user,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
    $ date
    Wed May 22 05:26:24 UTC 2019

  I touched none of the system defaults, and yet the motd has not
  updated automatically.

    $ ls -l /var/cache/motd-news
    -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 May  9 22:53 /var/cache/motd-news

  The systemd timer unit looks like this:

    $ systemctl status motd-news.timer 
    ● motd-news.timer - Message of the Day
       Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/motd-news.timer; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
       Active: active (elapsed) since Thu 2019-05-09 22:51:58 UTC; 1 weeks 5 days ago
      Trigger: n/a

    May 09 22:51:58 ip-172-31-23-224 systemd[1]: Started Message of the
  Day.

  If I run /etc/update-motd.d/50-motd-news --force manually, the file
  does update correctly.

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