iauth problems

[Hanno Foest <hurga@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

for some reason iauth is acting up lately. After some upgrades on my
Linux box, mainly moving to kernel 2.2.16 (previous: 2.2.15) and to
ircd 2.10.3p1 (previous: 2.10.3), iauth doesn't seem to restart properly
anymore after failure. The reject log gave the "No iauth!" message just
once every few days before the upgrades, but dozens of times after. And
the users can't connect anymore with a "Authentication failure!" message
if this happens. Sometimes a /rehash seems to help, sometimes the server
needs to be restarted. (Or maybe I'm just not patient enough...)

Since the number of users has been steadily growing and is now at about
80 - 100, maybe the ircd is running out of some resources because I didn't
set some compile time option correctly? Just a thought.

Another piece of info: One user reported that he was still getting ident
requests from my ircd after he had given up and connected to another
server. The last ident request he got 5 minutes after his last connection
attempt.

My questions:

- is this a known problem of the 2.10.3p1 ircd?
- is there a reliable way of restarting iauth without restarting ircd?
- any other ideas or debugging hints to remedy this problem?

Thanks in advance,

Hanno.