From KevinWiki

Message of the day (MOTD)

Troubleshooting

$ ls -l /var/run/motd* 

If it has /var/run/motd.new it might be caused by some scripts in /etc/update-motd.d/ Usually the program that the script runs doesn't exist anymore so it returns an error so failed to write /var/run/motd but /var/run/motd.new. Find which one causes the issue (probably move the scripts to somewhere else and move one by one to /etc/update-motd.d/ to check by log out and in again).

• It might be one of the scripts created by update-notifier-common so check it first by

$ apt-get purge update-notifier-common 

• To install it again,

$ apt-get install update-notifier-common 

• Or it might be update-manager-core.

$ apt-get purge update-manager-core 
$ apt-get install update-manager-core