named SUDDENLY stopped working

[DNS amateur]

on my master DNS server, rndc suddenly (March 1 2006) stopped working,
giving my the error "rndc: connect failed: timed out" this is after
MONTHS of being up, years after creation of the bind setup with the
keys and everything.

machine running sunOS 5.8, BIND 9.2.2rc1

my slave server works fine. When I try to connect to 127.0.0.1 953 port
on each server, on the slave I see the connection, on the master no
connection.

I verified that on server rndc.conf and named.conf use the same key,
access is allowed only from 127.0.0.1

named is running, (since Sep 2005), i tried kill -s HUP to the named
process with no luck.

before I restart the machine - is this a known issue, and anything I
can do to fix it? all help I saw regarding the specific error I get
refers to setup problems, this is definitely not the case here.