I'm trying to get CUPS to work and I'm having difficulty. The problem is apparently that of local networking not working, not a hardware problem in getting CUPS to work. My printer is connected to the USB port and gets identified (occasionally) by the printer identification program (printerdrake,... I'm using Mandrake 8.2). There is a listing in /etc/host for the local network IP. The network daemon is running. But I get no access to localhost, and specifically localhost:631 which CUPS uses. So, it's likely a network problem not a printer problem.

Any help is appreciated.

Nobody?!?!

Anybody?!?!?

well first what is the output of ifconfig. if you do have the loopback adapter running then that could be your problem. If you "ping localhost" what kind of a response do you get in return.

I get the same thing with CUPS configuration. I think the identification of the localhost by the NIC is screwed up. I get either

Forbidden
you don't have acces to that resource on the server.
Or I get
Not Found.
The requested resource was not found on this server.

This depends on whether I have in my network configuration localhost address 127.0.0.1 or my static ip address (handed to me by the departments sysadmin (linux naiive). I would assume that the localhost should have the 127.0.0.1 address but since it didn't work I tried the static IP address.

I am using the guis from kde to do all of this stuff.

ifconfig gives me information on the local loopback in both cases.
no errors that I can see. And ping goes on forever in both cases.
local 127.0.0.1 contacting 127.0.0.1
64 sent 64 received
64 sent 64 received
etc. etc.

I have been looking for some help on this for some time.

Thank you.