motd being printed only on debian squeeze boxes

[Jonathan Nicol]

Hi all, having a little trouble with output...

Using pssh with the -I option to read commands from stdin. Only on Debian Squeeze hosts, the motd is (undesirably) included in the output. Not so for Debian Etch hosts (and any other OS I've tried)

$ echo "hostname" | pssh --inline-stdout -t 60 -H root@server1 -H root@server2 -I
[1] 17:18:24 [SUCCESS] root@server1
Hardware => Physical (X9SCL/X9SCM) (CPU: 8, MEM: 15.62 GB)
OS       => Debian GNU/Linux 6.0.6 (squeeze) (Kernel: 3.2.2-hw2)
server1
[2] 17:18:25 [SUCCESS] root@server2
server2

Doesn't happen without -I  (and I assure you server2 does have a motd)

$ pssh --inline-stdout -t 60 -H root@server1 -H root@server2 "hostname"
[1] 17:18:48 [SUCCESS] root@server1
server1
[2] 17:18:48 [SUCCESS] root@server2
server2

Any suggestions/workarounds? Should I file a bug report? I have no idea what's different about Squeeze, but I've reproduced this on several hosts.

thanks,
Jonathan

[Pavol Bednar]

I can confirm same behavior on AIX boxes using openssh. 

Would be nice to have a option to omit this. 

[Andrew McNabb]

Have you looked at the PrintMotd option in /etc/ssh/sshd_config on the
server. I'm pretty sure that this is something in ssh rather than in
pssh.

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[Jonathan Nicol]

I've figured this out... Starting with Debian 6, the MOTD is controlled by a PAM module, not ssh, so the sshd options are useless. Unfortunately said module seems to print to stdout rather than stderr. The workaround is supplying a shell command (sh/bash/etc) *in addition* to the -I stdin, like so:
pssh -I --inline-stdout -h hostlist bash < pssh_execute_me

HTH someone else :)
Jonathan

[Andrew McNabb]

On Wed, Nov 06, 2013 at 06:24:56PM -0800, Jonathan Nicol wrote:
> I've figured this out... Starting with Debian 6, the MOTD is controlled by
> a PAM module, not ssh, so the sshd options are useless. Unfortunately said
> module seems to print to stdout rather than stderr. The workaround is
> supplying a shell command (sh/bash/etc) *in addition* to the -I stdin, like
> so:
> pssh -I --inline-stdout -h hostlist bash < pssh_execute_me

Thanks for tracking this down and sharing with everyone.