Comment 19 for bug 399071

Hello,

upgrading from lucid to maverik (server edition), for some reason, the package update-notifier-common was removed.
As main effect I have pam_motd to not refresh the /var/run/motd file.

Looking into the code (mainly the Steve's patch revision) I found the problem.
As Steve said: "I've also tweaked the first patch slightly, to avoid clobbering /var/run/motd if [...] the run-parts call fails;"
This is useful, but in my case, I have had a "dirty" update-motd.d directory, with some scripts exiting with error (ie: "run-parts: /etc/update-motd.d/20-cpu-checker exited with return code 2").
The system() call returns the error and the file /var/run/motd.new was never renamed into /var/run/motd.

Consider that even if some scripts of the update-mod.d chain fail, the file /var/run/motd.new is created and written to disk with the only output of the working scripts.

I have attached a patch that should solve this problem (at least I think it is a problem :) ).
The rename() call is not blocked by the system() call and moreover if run-parts exits with error (system()!=0) pam_syslog is used to log it and help sysadmins to find rapidly the problem.
If run-parts fails totally and /var/run/motd.new is not created, the rename() call returns the error (but we are not interested in it).

I hope to be useful.
Yusef