Eggdrop Documentation: Weird Messages That Get Logged

Weird Messages That Get Logged

Shown below are some messages that Eggdrop might log from time to time that are a bit strange and don't make it really that obvious what it's harping on about:

(!) timer drift -- spun N minutes

This is caused by one of several known things...

Your bot was swapped out of memory for a while, or that for some reason the computer stopped letting the bot run. Once a minute, Eggdrop does a few maintenance things, including counting down any Tcl timers you have going. If for some reason, several minutes pass without Eggdrop getting to do this, it logs this message to let you know what happened. It's generally a bad thing, because it means that the system your bot is on is very busy, and the bot can hardly keep track of the channel very well when it gets swapped out for minutes at a time.

On some systems (at least Linux) if the dns your bot is using to lookup hostnames is broken, and *very* slow in responding (this can occur if the dns's uplink doesn't exist) then you will get 4/5 minute time drifts continuously, not much can be done about this, it's an operating system problem :(

The clock on your machine has just been changed (e.g. it was running behind by several minutes and was just corrected)

(!) killmember(Nickname) -> nonexistant

We have yet to track this down. It's a mildly bad thing, though. It means the bot just got informed by the server that someone left the channel -- but the bot has no record of that person ever being ON the channel.

jwilkinson@mail.utexas.edu had some insight into this one:

This is not an Eggdrop bug, at least not most of the time. This is a bug in all but perhaps the very latest ircd systems. It's not uncommon during netsplits and other joins for the server to lose track of killed or collided join notices. Also, in some servers, it is possible to specify non-standard characters, such as carret symbols, which get falsely interpreted as capital letters.

When converted to lowercase, these symbols fail to get processed, and joins are not reported, although parts are.