https://cosmicirc.com/blog/ Engineering notes and postmortems from running CosmicIRC, an independent IRC network. en Fri, 25 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://cosmicirc.com/blog/the-crash-that-survived-every-fix/ https://cosmicirc.com/blog/the-crash-that-survived-every-fix/ Fri, 25 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT A typo-tracking script for our IRC network 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. https://cosmicirc.com/blog/pin-your-dockerfile/ https://cosmicirc.com/blog/pin-your-dockerfile/ Fri, 25 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT 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. https://cosmicirc.com/blog/dnsbl-and-the-bans-that-never-saved/ https://cosmicirc.com/blog/dnsbl-and-the-bans-that-never-saved/ Fri, 25 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT 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.