Engineering write-ups from operating an independent IRC network — real bugs, real fixes, and occasionally an honest "we don't know yet."
A typo-tracking script kept crashing eggdrop with free(): invalid size. We fixed the obvious cause. It kept crashing. Here's the investigation, and why we eventually gave up rather than ship a guess.
Adding one package to a working Dockerfile triggered a SIGSEGV crash-loop in an unrelated library. The cause wasn't the new package — it was every package we never pinned.
Adding spambot-blocklist checking to InspIRCd was supposed to be a quiet config change. It led us to discover every ban we'd ever set was memory-only and vanished on every restart.