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 may seem a bit strange and have meanings which may not be obvious

(!) timer drift -- spun N minutes

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

Your bot could have been swapped out of memory for a while, or for some reason the computer could have stopped letting the bot run. Once a minute, Eggdrop does a few maintenance things, including counting down any active Tcl timers. If for some reason, several minutes pass without Eggdrop being able 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 server's uplink doesn't exist), then you will get 4-5 minute timer drifts continuously. This can be fixed by loading the dns module.

The clock on your machine has just been changed. It may have been 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, however. 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.