Thank you. FWIW, this is the other advice I received, which makes sense:

Net::Ident appears to be abandoned to some degree.

Version 1.20 was written in 1999, and some CPAN testers have failed to install this module. The problem, I believe, is caused by not being able to connect to particular servers the author has specified in the test scripts. After 5 years, it isn't all that surprising if they no longer exist.
From the top of "t/Ident.t":

# test the Net::Ident module, which is a bitch, because you really
# need an ident daemon to test it, and then you usually get a connecti
+on
# from a remote machine, and then ask for the username.
# so what we do is try to make a connection to an ident daemon, on
# some machine, and if that succeeds, see if we can do a successful lo
+okup
# on that.
# This isn't guaranteed to succeed. If you are not (properly) connecte
+d
# to the internet, and if your localhost doesn't run an ident daemon,
# then this script won't work. If you do know a machine that you can
# currently reach, which runs an ident daemon, then put it's name or
# IPnumber in the 'hosts' file in the t/ directory.
#
[download]

You have two choices:

1. Install manually, jumping through the hoops to get the tests to pass. From the comment it looks like "t/hosts" is the hoop you need.

2. Force install without tests.