How do I bring back the initial 'stats page' (message of the day) after an upgrade to 14.04 server?

Solution 1:

The stats you see are provided by a script that uses the output of landscape-sysinfo in the update-motd building process. It appears to not be installed by default in 14.04 anymore.

Install landscape-common to have the stats re-inserted into the motd. (It might take 10 minutes for the cronjob to update the motd after installation).

Solution 2:

From the information gathered in the comments, you don't have the /etc/motd file. Since this is just a symlink to /var/run/motd and you confirmed that you have that file just recreate the link with:

sudo ln -s /var/run/motd /etc/motd  

Reboot the server.

Trivia:

• motd stands for "Message of the day". It contains the information you see when you boot the server.

• The scripts in the /etc/update-motd.d folder update the motd on boot.