While the servers may seem OK, this is not allways the case.
While you may be able to connect from your machine to the server, the machine theggdrop is on, may not. That, or the server may not allow connections from the machine the ggdrop is running on.
You can start eggdrop using the -n argument, to see what is happening at start time.
For the first time (without userfile) use
./eggdrop -mn config.file.name
ok I used this ./eggdrop -mn config.file.name
and here's the error
[09:44] Connected to SERVER.NAME
[09:44] -NOTICE- *** Looking up your hostname...
[09:44] -NOTICE- *** Checking Ident
[09:44] -NOTICE- *** Got Ident response
[09:44] -NOTICE- *** Couldn't look up your hostname
[09:44] -ERROR from server- Closing Link: BOT.NAME[nick@255.255.255.255] (Bad user info)
[09:44] Disconnecting from server.
[09:45] Trying server NEXT.SERVER
[09:45] DNS resolved NEXT.SERVER to IP
[09:45] net: connect! sock 7
[09:45] Connected to SERVER.NAME
[09:45] -NOTICE- *** Looking up your hostname...
[09:45] -NOTICE- *** Checking Ident
[09:45] -NOTICE- *** Couldn't look up your hostname
[09:45] -NOTICE- *** Got Ident response
[09:45] -ERROR from server- Closing Link: BOT.NICK[nick@255.255.255.255] (You are not authorized to use this server)