Ubuntu 9.10 – There was an error during the CUPS operation: ‘httpConnectionEncrypt failed’.

by Craig Mayhew on Jan.07, 2010, under General

CUPS had me chasing around for a while to fix this issue. Whenever I tried to print I realized there were no printers and going to “System -> Administration -> Printing” caused the error “There was an error during the CUPS operation: ‘httpConnectionEncrypt failed’” when I tried to connect to the local CUPS service. The “/etc/init.d/cups” file had completely disappeared and reinstalling the cups package didn’t fix it! In the end I marked the cups package for “complete removal” which also removes the configuration files. After this I then reinstalled CUPS, “/etc/init.d/cups” reappeared and it worked once again. Unfortunately I had to reinstall my printers on this machine.

Steps were:

  1. Complete removal of CUPS package including the configuration files
  2. Reinstall the CUPS package.
  3. Start the CUPS service with “sudo /etc/init.d/cups restart” in the terminal.
  4. Reinstall your printers
  5. Print stuff!
:, ,

4 Comments for this entry

  • Ryan

    Thanks. Worked like a charm.

  • hooke

    Thanks. I run into the same problem. After finding your post I went to Synaptic for complete removal of cups package, and discovered, that it wasn’t installed! After marking it for installation I saw the reason – Synaptic suggested to remove the xpdf-utils! I’d installed this in an attempt to find some OCR software. So, there was a conflict between cups & xpdf-utils, and I didn’t paid much attention during installation of xpdf-utils. So cups was uninstalled though all the configuration files remained. Now, after installation of cups (and removal of xpdf-utils) everything works properly.

  • A Happy Chappy

    Thanks also – had exactly the same problem and this fixed it for me! :)

  • dpc

    Thanx hooke, that nailed my problem as well. stupid xpdf…

Leave a Reply


In a bid to lower the spam levels on this blog, please type the following captcha code

Visit our friends!

A few highly recommended friends...