This is a useful hack for VPS servers to send an email as a login-notify to an email address.

Prerequisites

You need to have a working mail subsystem on your host so that the mail command works.

This works with Ubuntu 22.04 and later versions.

Modify PAM to notify on login

Open the file /etc/pam.d/common-session and at the bottom add the following line:

session optional pam_exec.so /root/script/login-notify

Login-Notify script

Create the following script in /root/script/login-notify

#!/bin/bash # # This script is run by PAM from /etc/pam.d/common-session by adding the following # line to the bottom of the configuration file: # # session optional pam_exec.so /root/script/login-notify # # Make sure the script is executeable # # ichi@ichimusai.org # Revision 1.0.0 # [ "$PAM_TYPE" = "open_session" ] || exit 0 { echo "User: $PAM_USER" echo "Ruser: $PAM_RUSER" echo "Rhost: $PAM_RHOST" echo "Service: $PAM_SERVICE" echo "TTY: $PAM_TTY" echo "Date: `date +"%y%m%d-%H%M%S"`" echo "Server: `hostname -s`" } | mail -s "[`hostname -s`] $PAM_SERVICE login: $PAM_USER" anders@sikvall.se & 

This script will now be executed upon login and should send an email to the recipient with login matters.