John Bleichert wrote...
Should I take this up with the package maintainer?
No need for that, I'm also here.
Jan 11 13:59:18 boogie ngircd[9566]: ngircd 19.2-SYSLOG+ZLIB+SSL+IRCPLUS+IPv6-x86_64/pc/linux-gnu started. Jan 11 13:59:18 boogie ngircd[9566]: Using configuration file "/etc/ngircd/ngircd.conf" ...
I'd expect the "gnutls 2.12.20 initialized." here, just as below.
Jan 11 13:59:18 boogie ngircd[9566]: Warning: Error during SSL initialization, continuing ... Jan 11 13:59:18 boogie ngircd[9567]: Running as user irc(39), group irc(39), with PID 9567.
So, can you please check whether more lines got lost by coincidence? Wild guessing, the x509 private key file isn't readable by the irc user ngircd runs as. But that will result in an error message, too.
How do things look if ngircd is started as the irc user, i.e. "su -c /usr/sbin/ngircd irc"? The init scripts does quite the same, that could explain the different behaviour to ngircd called from command line (as root).
Christoph