IRC Bridge Docs: How to Troubleshoot

charm
1

How to troubleshoot IRC bridge issues

This section will help you troubleshoot various issues with the IRC bridge charm.

Synapse stops sending events to the IRC bridge

This section details the issue when Synapse stops sending events to the IRC bridge.

Symptoms

  • Synapse is unable to push appservice transactions to the IRC bridge.
  • Synapse logs may indicate errors such as “Server not known” or appservice-specific warnings.
  • The database shows appservice_stream_position stuck at an old event, and restarting Synapse does not resolve the issue.
  • Logs from Synapse may contain warnings similar to:
    push_bulk to https://chat.example.com/irc threw exception(JSONDecodeError): Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)

Root cause

The appservice_stream_position in the Synapse database can get stuck on a problematic event, causing the appservice sender to break silently and stop processing new events.

Solution

  1. Back up the Synapse database: Before making any changes, ensure you have a full backup of your Synapse database to prevent data loss.

    Find more details about the backup in How to Backup and Restore.

  2. Update the appservice_stream_position: Run the following SQL query to update the appservice_stream_position to the latest event:

    UPDATE appservice_stream_position
SET stream_ordering = (SELECT MAX(stream_ordering) FROM events);

  3. Restart Synapse: After executing the query, restart the Synapse service to apply the changes.

Additional notes

  • This solution skips the problematic event and allows Synapse to resume sending events to the IRC bridge.
  • If the issue persists, check the Synapse logs for additional errors or misconfigurations.
  • In this IRC-Bridge issue, you can find more details about the error.