From the Waste of Time Dept.: hpss unable to bind to socket

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