No more IRC server!
Once again, the administrative burden of the tiny IRC network I’ve been an ircop on for over a decade now started to get on my tits. This time around though, I let it get to me and had a bit of a spat with my co-admin. Probably no small portion of it was me being unreasonable, but I do feel like I had a valid grievance buried in there somewhere… I’ve been an ircd admin, almost non-stop (brief breaks here and there) for over 20 years now. I administered the whole server, and paid for the VPS it runs on for around ten years, and I’m tired of it.
I put up with the friendly ribbing about FreeBSD being to blame for every little thing that went wrong, and so I agreed to switch it to Linux if my co-admin would take on more responsibilities. Since then, I feel like there’s been more rather than less for me to do with it on a weekly basis. He picked Arch for the OS, and as part of the “chasing it’s rolling release schedule” the machine is rebooted for updates pretty much weekly, which annoyed me but fuck it I can deal with that. But Charybdis has multiple times introduced breaking changes which forced me to upgrade my IRCd as well in order to re-establish the link between them.
The straw that broke the camel’s back was entirely my fault: acme.sh didn’t reload the ircd the last time it updated the certificate (I’m not sure if it’s Charybdis, systemd, or acme.sh’s fault and at this point I don’t care to figure it out), which caused the certificate to be expired when the weekly reboot happened, and the links couldn’t come back. I woke up to a body-less email “fix the ircd”, with no details whatsoever and I’m not gonna lie, it ruined my day. After a brief argument of which my side amounted to “I concede that this particular time was my fault, but we have to find a way to make this shit annoy me less” and was dismissively rebuffed, I lost my shit.
There’s maybe five people on our network at any given time, we don’t need two machines for capacity by any stretch of the imagination, I was only keeping the second one around to give folks somewhere stable to connect to so they’re not kicked off every 7 days. But fuck it, it’s not fun any more, IRC is not that serious, I just don’t give a shit, so I killed it off and redirected my hostname to the other machine. I completely washed my hands of it, everything is now his problem, I’ll continue paying for the VPS but that’s it.
So I woke up in the morning for the first time in a very long time, no longer an IRC admin. I still maintain my belief that no one who wants to be one is in any way qualified.
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