New Message of the Day (MOTD): An updated tool for a more efficient communication#

Have you ever logged into a system and been greeted by a welcoming message? That's the Message of the Day, or MOTD for short. At SCITAS, we use the MOTD on every cluster for providing important information and updates to our users. Recently, we have revamped our MOTD to make it even more informative and visually appealing.

Why did we make these changes? One of the main reasons was that over time, users tend to overlook the MOTD as they become accustomed to seeing it. Despite containing important details about system updates, problems, and future maintenance, the messages often go unread. To address this, we came up with a solution: temporary messages. Each message now has a predefined validity period, which can be adjusted as needed. Initially, the message appears in regular text, but over time, its color gradually fades to indicate that it will soon disappear. Additionally, each announcement is assigned a criticality attribute, which alters its display color based on its level of importance. We hope that this new and more organic version will improve our communication with our users.

Simplifying our workflow was another driving factor behind the MOTD update. We developed a new MOTD tool using Python, which separates the code from the data, i.e. the messages themselves). This separation allows us to easily add or remove announcements by modifying a YAML configuration file, without the need to touch the code of the tool. This simplify our wokflow, but also ensures that we will not introduce bugs in the code by inadvertence.

For further details on how our new MOTD system works and its various features, we have a dedicated documentation that you can refer to.