"Updates are available" MOTD on SSH
Posted: Thu Aug 02, 2012 7:09 am
Hi
I've spent since yesterday morning looking for an answer to this all over the internet, but have had to admit defeat. I don't know if I'm just phrasing my queries wrong or what, but... Anyway.
I have, at home, a Mint box and a Debian box. I'd noticed, as I've been using an SSH connection to tunnel my browsing at work out of my home connection via the Mint box, that when I SSH on, the server displays some kind of MOTD (not sure if it's PAM handling it or what?) that includes some information about available updates / security updates / upgrades. You'll probably all have seen this - I assume it's the default behaviour for Mint.
Now, I like that feature when logging in - it helps me remember to run check for updates each day. I thought it'd be a reasonably easy thing to configure it to work on my Debian box when I logged on there over SSH. I've looked at apt-get and aptitude, to see if there's anything built in there (the closest I got was considering that I could do:
which will give me the number of matched installed and upgradable packages - but it's certainly not as clean as the listing that's provided by Mint on login (which, by the way, looks suspiciously like a line out of "apt-get upgrade" anyways ("4 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.", for example).
I hope this query makes sense... There must be a sensible way of achieving want I want here. Does anyone know how Mint currently does it? As I can't imagine it'd be that hard to implement Mint's process, to Debian.
I'm still relatively new to Linux so, be gentle?
I've spent since yesterday morning looking for an answer to this all over the internet, but have had to admit defeat. I don't know if I'm just phrasing my queries wrong or what, but... Anyway.
I have, at home, a Mint box and a Debian box. I'd noticed, as I've been using an SSH connection to tunnel my browsing at work out of my home connection via the Mint box, that when I SSH on, the server displays some kind of MOTD (not sure if it's PAM handling it or what?) that includes some information about available updates / security updates / upgrades. You'll probably all have seen this - I assume it's the default behaviour for Mint.
Now, I like that feature when logging in - it helps me remember to run check for updates each day. I thought it'd be a reasonably easy thing to configure it to work on my Debian box when I logged on there over SSH. I've looked at apt-get and aptitude, to see if there's anything built in there (the closest I got was considering that I could do:
Code: Select all
aptitude search "~U" | wc -l
I hope this query makes sense... There must be a sensible way of achieving want I want here. Does anyone know how Mint currently does it? As I can't imagine it'd be that hard to implement Mint's process, to Debian.
I'm still relatively new to Linux so, be gentle?