Last words

Charly's Column – A FIGlet Farewell

Article from Issue 257/2022
Author(s):

After two decades as a sys admin columnist, Charly bids a fitting farewell with a login banner created with FIGlet.

When I log in to servers or network components, I am often greeted by a large font banner with variable information content. Sometimes it simply tells me the hostname, sometimes the kernel version, and sometimes it reads DO NOT REBOOT BETWEEN 8AM AND 8PM.

Of course, it is debatable whether banners make sense or are just nonsense, and I use them sparingly on my own systems. However, servers that I can't just play around with warn me with a banner that reads Abyssus abyssum invocat (one mistake leads to another). Test systems for evaluating new software, on the other hand, cheerfully greet me with Morituri te salutant (those who are about to die, salute you). I've fared quite well with that banner all these years, but how do you create one?

I use FIGlet [1] for this. All of the popular distros include this tool, which supports several fonts and offers a variety of design options. I don't use any of them – I just want to get an unambiguous message across when logging in. That's why I only use the -c parameter to center the banner, which would otherwise be left-justified. For my farewell banner, I make an exception and also use the -D parameter, which lets you display German umlauts. I can usually ignore these with my Latin calendar sayings. FIGlet replaces special characters such as [, \, and ] with ƒ, ÷, and ‹ while {, |, and } give you the corresponding lowercase letters. The call

[...]

Use Express-Checkout link below to read the full article (PDF).

Buy this article as PDF

Download Article PDF now with Express Checkout
Price $2.95
(incl. VAT)

Buy Linux Magazine

SINGLE ISSUES
Print Issues
Digital Issues
SUBSCRIPTIONS
Print Subscriptions
Digital Subscriptions

Related content

  • Charly's Column – httpstat

    Httpstat is a special stopwatch you can use to discover how long web servers take to serve up a static or dynamic HTML page. Visible performance lags indicate optimization potential for the server.

    more »
  • Charly's Birds

    Charly ran a first-generation Rasp Pi for years in the birdhouse in his garden, but the Rasp Pi eventually fell foul of marauding wasps. Now Charly has replaced it with an RPi3 featuring a NoIR cam and motion detection.

    more »
  • Onion OS

    Adding custom firmware to a handheld gaming device enhances your gaming experience and lets you write custom apps. We show you how with Onion OS on a Miyoo Mini Plus.

    more »
  • Charly's Column: Miniflux

    Sys admin Charly Kühnast typically follows 40 to 50 RSS feeds using Tiny Tiny RSS on his own server. Now, the good times spent with the faithful Tiny are coming to an end. Read on to discover the whole story.

    more »
  • The sysadmin's daily grind: Pi-hole

    A strange rule seems to dictate that the most useless products and services have the most annoying online advertising. Columnist Charly blocks the garish advertising for all computers on his network centrally with the Pi-hole tool, which is not only for Raspberry Pi devices.

    more »
comments powered by Disqus
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters

Support Our Work

Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.

Learn More

News

Tag Cloud

Administration Community Desktop Events Hardware Linux Mobile Programming Security Software Ubuntu Web Development Windows free software open source