cups daemon fails to start on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5

Issue

• Cups stopped working initially with segfault:

Nov 19 16:41:06 localhost kernel: cupsd[5580]: segfault at 00002b651b0e9168 rip 00002b64b7473e66 rsp 00007fff16970960 error 4

• On attempting to restart the service the command below does not return to the prompt :

# service cups start

• The cupsd daemon is running but cannot connect to the service e.g. using lpstat