In Fedora Core 6, when from the Firefox browser I enter: http://localhost:631 instead of seeing the expected cups page, "nothing happens" Firefox shows a moving circular arrow like its trying to connect, but no error message, and no timeout (it probably would eventually)

This worked at one time, so I have done "something" to kill it. Searched in linuxquestions and also Googled localhost:631 and found no hits on this. I did find posts with these diagostic commands saying both should show tcp 0.0.0.0:631

netstat -nl | grep 631 and netstat -pan | grep tcp

They both show "udp" instead of "tcp", viz: udp 0 0 0.0.0.0:631
Am guessing this is the problem. Can anyone suggest corrective action to get "tcp" to replace "udp"?

localhost 127.0.0.1 is in the /etc/hosts file and I am able to use turboprint to print to my canon i950 printer.

Thank you.

Are you sure about 127.0.0.1 being in /etc/hosts for FC6??? Did you manually edit this file because I see;

$ cat /etc/hosts
# Do not remove the following line, or various programs
# that require network functionality will fail.
::1 localhost.localdomain localhost

Which is perfectly fine, also any problem with using; http://127.0.0.1:631 instead??

Thank you for the reply.

http://127.0.0.1 returns "unable to connect" "firefox can't establish a connection to the server at 127.0.0.1" But at least it didn't loop. :-)))

My /etc/hosts content:
# Do not remove the following line, or various programs
# that require network functionality will fail.
::1 kpchisai.com
127.0.0.1 kpchisai.com
192.168.1.101 DELLDT01

The ::1 and 127 lines were already there when the "hosts" panel was displayed. I added the 192.168.1.101 line via Gnome's system/Administration/network/hosts/new panel. Cannot get Samba's smbtree or smbclient to work (Get "connection refused" message - its a Windows XP SP2 box), so added its address to hosts hoping it would clear that in case the "refused" was coming from Samba, but of course it wasn't.

I just deleted that line - via the Gnome panels, and rebooted, but no change in symptom.

Is the cups daemon running? If it isn't no page will be displayed in the browser as described. Check via the top or ps command.

Its running, I think (I'm still learning Linux, so may be wrong)
Line from ps -ef
...
root 2822 1 0 11:14 ? 00:00:00 cupsd
...

Problem solved. Am posting this in case someone else runs into the same issue.

I took the coward's way out and re-installed Fedora Core 6 and now http://localhost:631 works.

Did a netstat -nl | grep 631 and it shows
tcp 0 0 ::1:631
so looks like my thought in the original post where that command showed "udp" instead of "tcp" was the cause. I have no idea what I did to get it changed from "tcp" to "udp", but will definetely keep a better "settings change log" from now on.

FYI the results from netstat -nl | grep 631 show both TCP and UDP on my server that runs trustix.

Thanks, Michaelk. My last post was sloppy. After the FC6 reinstall, the netstat -nl | grep 631 does show upd and tcp for port 631. When I had the original problem, it only showed the udp entry, and the post I'd found with Google only talked about "tcp" so I didn't realize that both protocols were involved.