Debian

If you're using a Debian based distro then this is likely what's causing your issue.


motd - Debian Wiki


excerpt


  /etc/motd in Debian
  
  Debian has a peculiar way of handling /etc/motd. The motd is updated at every reboot, in a boot script (/etc/init.d/bootmisc.sh in lenny and below, /etc/init.d/bootlogs in squeeze and above), which basically runs the following:

   uname -snrvm &gt; /var/run/motd
   [ -f /etc/motd.tail ] &amp;&amp; cat /etc/motd.tail &gt;&gt; /var/run/motd

  
  Since /etc/motd is a symlink to /var/run/motd in Debian, this works.
  
  How to update your /etc/motd
  
  Since /etc/motd basically gets overwritten at every reboot, you need to instead update /etc/motd.tail and either reboot (!!) or also edit /etc/motd.tail or run the above commands. There is a bug report (437176) to provide an easier command to allow you to update only /etc/motd.tail.


Red Hat based distros (Fedora/CentOS/RHEL)

For these types of distros I'm not aware of any automated system that would revert these files back to known versions as part of a reboot. These files are often times statically included on these systems in RPM packages such as these:

CentOS 5.x

$ rpm -qf /etc/issue /etc/motd
centos-release-5-9.el5.centos.1
setup-2.5.58-9.el5


CentOS 6.x

$ rpm -qf /etc/issue /etc/motd 
centos-release-6-5.el6.centos.11.2.x86_64
setup-2.8.14-20.el6_4.1.noarch


Fedora 19

$ rpm -qf /etc/issue /etc/motd 
fedora-release-19-8.noarch
setup-2.8.71-1.fc19.noarch


Further more a simple search for /etc/issue or /etc/motd within /etc turns up no such mechanism.

$ sudo grep -r /etc/issue /etc/*


Permissions changing on few files under /etc/
In Once Upon a Time, when you use magic we usually see that magic looks like colored smoke/mist like in this picture.



Is there a symbolic meaning behind the different colors when using magic or is it just for show?

E.g. Rumplestilskins magic looks red, Zelenas is Green, Emmas is blue or maybe purple I think. Anyone know.
