This is for those folk in google land querying for "hpss Unable to bind to socket"
I am running a tiny appliance that is configured with Voyage linux. Its my always-on box that runs as web, mail, print, and file server. Between a update or two printing stopped working. A few minutes of investigation told me that something went wrong when starting /etc/init.d/hplip. It generated the following error:
Nov 3 19:22:39 tiny hpiod: 1.6.10 accepting connections at 2208…
Nov 3 19:22:40 tiny python: hpssd[24441] error: Server exited with error: Unable to bind to socket
Reinstalling cupsys, hplip, and foomatic did not fix this problem.
It took me quite a while to figure out what was wrong: localhost did not resolve to 127.0.0.1. The reasons for this are manyfold but boil down to the fact that I try not to mess with the default configuration to much and that that default configuration happens to create an /etc/resolv.conf that points to opendns resolvers. Those do not resolve localhost to 127.0.0.1 but to their web-traffic-magnet address.
The fix: make sure that /etc/hosts existed with a mapping from 127.0.0.1 to localhost