Eggdrop Common Setup Problems

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So you've downloaded, compiled, installed, and configured your eggdrop bot. Now it's time to run your bot--but then something goes wrong.

A lot of things could go wrong when you run your bot. Here are just a few things that have happened to me more than once.

Scenario 1: Bot won't let you login after you just set the password

So your bot comes online, you message the bot "hello", you "set password", and all is well. You decide to kill the bot to make some changes and add some scripts. But then when you restart it, you can't login to the bot, and it doesn't respond to commands.

Chances are you killed the process for the bot from the shell, instead of from a DCC window. The correct way to close the bot would be a ".die" in a DCC chat, which will gracefully shut down the bot. The bot probably didnt save the user file yet. So your account and password have now been lost. No problem, you just have to go throuth the "Hello" and "Set Password" routine again. This time use .die to shut down the bot, or .save to save your files before killing the process.

Scenario 2: You try to launch the bot, the script says it's executing and then nothing happens

You typed ./eggdrop -m botname.conf and the bot says it's starting in user creation mode. You watch for the bot to enter on irc and it never comes.

No errors on the shell, and no bot on IRC. Two things could have happened:

1. The bot didn't successfully connect to the IRC server, and it's stuck offline
2. Something went wrong with the process, but didn't dump out an error.

Let's make sure the bot is actually running first. The first time you run the bot it should create a pid.botname file. If the pid.botname file is missing chances are the bot didn't launch completely. If you didn't get an error message, you can either search the .conf file line by line for your mistake, or just create a new one. A misconfigured .conf file does not always result in an error message.

Another way to see if the bot is actually running would be to check the processes running from your shell account. To do this a simple "ps" will most likely suffice. On some servers you may need to use a "ps aux | grep egg" which will display all processes containing the string "egg". If you do not see your process running, and your script did not create the .pid file mentioned above chances are your config file is corrupted. The easiest fix is just to copy a working file, and edit it again.

Scenario 3: Everything is working great, now you try to DCC the bot and it won't connect

This usually happens because you are trying to connect to the bot thru a proxy, firewall, or bnc client. Most of the time this solution will work. Simply request a chat from the bot using a ctcp chat request. "/CTCP <botname> chat" the bot will DCC chat request you, you accept and you're in.