Comment 1 for bug 312809

What version of update-motd are you using? I looked at the source package, as well as the cron.d entry placed when I installed the current version (1.8) of the package. It looks as follows:

# /etc/cron.d/update-motd: crontab fragment for update-motd
#
# Running 'update-motd' dynamically generates the /etc/motd with
# a concatenation of output from each script in /etc/update-motd.d.

*/10 * * * * root [ -x /usr/sbin/update-motd ] && /usr/sbin/update-motd 2>/dev/null

Which runs every ten minutes.

Looking through the changelog, I don't see any mention of changes being made to the timing through releases. That does not appear to be the crontab installed with the package -- looks like someone wrote their own.