Very unhappy with FreeBSD 13 MOTD

drhowarddrfine said:
why they wanted to maintain compatibility with Unix for systems from SGI and others
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No, it's because it's based on NEXTSTEP, which is Mach/BSD4.x released in 1989. Conformance was obtained in 2007 with version 10.5, which kind of makes sense because macOS 10.0-10.4 was kind of a work in progress.
 
To me, unix has always philosophically stood aside from other platforms in many different ways - one among which is the elegance of simplicity. Making things more complicated for <reasons> is a matter to wonder whether the solution was the right one for the problem. Making complicated things simple without losing function is very difficult work, and I personally have deep appreciation for this effort.

FreeBSD's recognition of some of these philosophies (actions speak louder than words here) is what appealed to me and differentiated it from other unix-like platforms: it's not "frankensteined" like many linux distros are, it's not over-engineered, it doesn't feel thoughtless or sloppy, it doesn't have a licensing complex, it feels smart and approachable. It's simple enough to understand and flexible enough to do everything I want, and its ways of doing things have historically been fairly well rationalized (at least all things I cared about).

This MOTD change is another step in unraveling these ideas in freeBSD, an evolutionary wart. The fixes resulting from this change should have been applied in a way that requires admins who need special functionality to jump through hoops, rather than the other way around.

I'm not implying that progress shouldn't happen and things shouldn't evolve, but this approach to trivial problem solving is breaking one of the fundamental appeals of this system to me and tells me which direction things are headed.
 
drhowarddrfine said:
Ya' know someone could get on the mailing list and ask the devs why rather than sit here complaining with awe and wonder about it.
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Seems like a rather odd, trollish hill to die on. The point about taking something simple and making it complex is valid, but a lot of the rest?
 
I'm not convinced motd is complex now. Maybe it's just has more functionality.
But just like sendmail i would personally see it out of base and into ports.
 
Alain De Vos said:
I'm not convinced motd is complex now. Maybe it's just has more functionality.
But just like sendmail i would personally see it out of base and into ports.
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It is no longer a plain text file in /etc/motd , it has become more complex.

Your idea is halfway there, I'll improve on it: by default /etc/motd text file as it was. A more complex motd could then be installed via ports/pkg if desired.
 
Supertim just be aware in these forums the high message count club are very cliquey. Also worth noting, in the forums "Staff Member" is just a super admin on the forum (nothing more).

Depending on your background, e.g. systemd PTSD, it may sway your reaction to the motd change.

Anyway there is a lot of great technical info in these forums so don't give up.
 
p.s. doing this suited my needs:
Code: 
#12 (already in place)
test -f /etc/motd && sed -i '' '2,$d' /etc/motd
#13 (wtf no /etc/motd??)
test -f /etc/motd || touch /root/.hushlogin
And that's all nice and simple AFTER finding out it changed and taking the TIME to see if it affected others and FINDING forum posts mentioning '.hushlogin' being the right thing to do...
 
/etc/motd was useful in the days when unix was a time sharing system with many people logged in and the admins wanted to broadcast a message to all. It’s pretty much useless these days when everyone has their own personal machine. That is why it is growing weeds!
 
bakul said:
It’s pretty much useless these days when everyone has their own personal machine. That is why it is growing weeds!
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It was so useless and unused that some guy saw this as his chance to over-engineer the crap out of it whilst no-one was looking ;)

Open-source is strange sometimes. I personally think it was someone who liked all the junk that Ubuntu spits out when you ssh in and wanted to emulate similar functionality / noise.

From here: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D26654

It looks like the weirdness can be disabled via:

Code: 
# service motd disable

# /etc/rc.conf
update_motd="NO"

Once I have confirmed, I will just add this to my growing installer script. The number of these hacks have grown more in the last two years than the 10 years before it! Luckily it is still considerably less than the madness that is Linux. ;)
 
Tieks , Yep, not buying the security bit, after all they say modify the template in /etc anyway.

Looking at my work's analysis for when/if we upgrade to 13, one of the issues is actually this. We're legally obliged to have certain notices so it's essential. Whether it's a show stopper we'll find out when someone gets to that particular issue. I think I was being too flippant with my original comment.

So what I'm saying is these things have real-world impacts.

(Oh, and yes, .hushlogin works, but we lock user accounts with read-only permission to their login files and have scripts that run and remove things like .hushlogin, .forward etc).
 
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kpedersen said:
It was so useless and unused that some guy saw this as his chance to over-engineer the crap out of it whilst no-one was looking ;)
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It does look like that, doesn't it. Has anyone managed to find the actual change for this and why it went ahead?

kpedersen said:
Open-source is strange sometimes. I personally think it was someone who liked all the junk that Ubuntu spits out when you ssh in and wanted to emulate similar functionality / noise.

From here: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D26654https://reviews.freebsd.org/D26654
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But this is post the event. I would love to read the rationale behind this change.

If you look here, you can understand the logic behind some. If I point out the discussion raised by Ed Maste about removing ftpd, there is an obvious discussion. I cannot find the same for this motd change.
Perhaps it was just a thought bubble of Warner (Losh) and Conrad (Meyer?)?

Is this motd as a service something systemd/linux does?
Edit:
I checked, (I don't run 13 yet), and it's not really a service as in some daemon running, it's just an install of /var/run/motd to /etc/motd using the template. Why it's done this way? Who knows.

It's only ever going to be impactful at boot or if you physically run the script to "re-activate" it. The status-quo should be maintained by simply adding, by default, sysrc update_motd=no and ensuring it is always done for every release into the future.

Edit 2:
I played around. Deleting /var/run/motd and re-creating a soft link to /etc/motd in /var/run works. There are obviously other ways around this.

kpedersen said:
It looks like the weirdness can be disabled via:

Code: 
# service motd disable

# /etc/rc.conf
update_motd="NO"

Once I have confirmed, I will just add this to my growing installer script. The number of these hacks have grown more in the last two years than the 10 years before it! Luckily it is still considerably less than the madness that is Linux. ;)
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BUT, it's disappointing that it's heading that way.
There's lots of stuff that can be fixed in FreeBSD and they screw around with motd? Seriously?
 
kpedersen said:
I would say that UNIX as a design still represents the *only* system that has truly stood the test of time.
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Nah, OS/360 is about 10-15 years older, and still being actively developed and sold. It still makes IBM an enormous amount of money. And a while ago I heard that GCOS (the old General Electric OS from the early 60s) is also still being sold. Both have stood a longer test of time.

Regarding what "Unix" even means: If Dennis and Ken looked at a modern Unix machine (any flavor, whether it's proprietary or open source, and I'm explicitly including *BSD and Linux in that), they would not recognize very many things. Dennis can't do that any longer; Ken is still around, and last I heard, he used a Chromebook (!) as his personal machine: That is a computer that doesn't even expose an operating system, only a web browser. Claiming that something is "the Unix way" is pretty silly.

Now, the above doesn't mean that I particularly like or dislike the new /etc/motd mechanism; not having tried it yet, I don't have strong opinions.
 
That FreeBSD Developers are making motd more complicated shows that either they are neglecting important things or that there are too much unnecessary developers. It is like the story of lua in the boot loader. My opinion.
 
Get out a text editor and change /etc/motd:

Code: 
FreeBSD 12.2-RELEASE-p7 GENERIC 

                           ,          ,
                          /(          )\
                          \\ \\___   / /
                          /- _  `-/  ' !
                          (/\\/ \\ \\   /
                          / /   | `    \
                          O O   ) /    |
                         `-^--'`<     '
                        (_.)  _  )   /
                         `.___/`    /
                           `-----' /
              <----.     __ / __   \\
              <----|====O)))==) \\) /====
              <----'    `--' `.__,' \\
                            |        |
                            \\       /
                      ______( (_  / \\______
                    ,'  ,-----'   |        \\
                    `--{__________)        \\/
 
ralphbsz said:
Ken is still around, and last I heard, he used a Chromebook (!) as his personal machine
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I find that hard to believe. At least in 2010 he used MacOS + plan9ports, as per Russ Cox in

[9fans] What operating systems are the google guys using?

groups.google.com groups.google.com
The standard set up for a Plan 9 aficionado here seems to
be a Mac or Linux machine running Plan 9 from User Space
to get at sam, acme, and the other tools. Rob, Ken, Dave, and I
use Macs as our desktop machines, but we're a bit of an exception.
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Always carry a notebook with you.

1628407305691.png


And don't forget the pencil.
 
Trihexagonal said:
Get out a text editor and change /etc/motd:

Code: 
FreeBSD 12.2-RELEASE-p7 GENERIC

                           ,          ,
                          /(          )\
                          \\ \\___   / /
                          /- _  `-/  ' !
                          (/\\/ \\ \\   /
                          / /   | `    \
                          O O   ) /    |
                         `-^--'`<     '
                        (_.)  _  )   /
                         `.___/`    /
                           `-----' /
              <----.     __ / __   \\
              <----|====O)))==) \\) /====
              <----'    `--' `.__,' \\
                            |        |
                            \\       /
                      ______( (_  / \\______
                    ,'  ,-----'   |        \\
                    `--{__________)        \\/
Click to expand...
And you'll see nothing as /etc/motd is not used unless you stay on 12.
 
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