"Graham Vickrage" <graham@digitalplanit.com> writes:
> I have just exited from a psql session where I dropped a table and then
> immediately logged back in and now I am getting: -
> IDENT authentication failed for user 'postgres'
> I have checked all the usual; ph_hba.conf, pg_shadow, restarting postmaster
> with -i and environment variable PGHOST=localhost.
Did you look in the postmaster log? There should be a more-detailed
message there.
A first guess, though, is that your identd daemon stopped running.
regards, tom lane