xsane can't see Brother ADS-2700W scanner

[Charlie Gibbs]

I just got a Brother ADS-2700W sheet-fed scanner and am trying
to access it from xsane. I've done a lot of flatbed scanning,
first with an HP 3970, and lately with an Epson WF-2650 all-in-one,
but I have a lot of old manuals I want to scan and upload to
Bitsavers, and a sheet feeder will speed the process along.

The Brother got a lot of good reviews so I decided to give it a try.
It offers many options, such as e-mail, [S]FTP, etc. over Ethernet,
wi-fi, and USB. But so far, I haven't been able to get xsane to
recognize it. My wife tried to get at it from her Macbook (which
accesses the Epson with no trouble), but had no luck either.
It's not a connectivity issue - the scanner happily connects
to my wi-fi and gets an IP address, and I can access it from
a web browser and get at all of its configuration screens.
But neither xsane nor my wife's Macbook can see it.

The one way I did manage to get the scanner to work was to a
USB flash drive. It quickly sucked in a handful of sheets,
scanned both sides, and wrote them to a file on the stick.
If all else fails, I can work with it that way. But I'd
really like to let xsane manage the process.

I'm beginning to wonder, though, whether fashions are changing.
Scanners nowadays seem to want to push data to a server, rather
than being commanded to scan by a computer. Is this really
happening? If so, whither (or should that be "wither") xsane?

If anyone has gotten one of these newfangled machines to work
as a slave, rather than a master, please share your secrets.

aTdHvAaNnKcSe...

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | They don't understand Microsoft
\ / <cgi...@kltpzyxm.invalid> | has stolen their car and parked
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | a taxi in their driveway.
/ \ if you read it the right way. | -- Mayayana

[Bit Twister]

On 31 Mar 2021 02:22:01 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
> I just got a Brother ADS-2700W sheet-fed scanner and am trying
> to access it from xsane.

> The Brother got a lot of good reviews so I decided to give it a try.
> It offers many options, such as e-mail, [S]FTP, etc. over Ethernet,
> wi-fi, and USB. But so far, I haven't been able to get xsane to
> recognize it.

I have no experience with your model. I run Mageia Release Linux OS.

Make is easy on myself by setting/using a static ethernet ip on all
nodes on my lan and in my Brother printer.

Installed
sane-frontends ! Graphical frontend to SANE​
xsane ! Frontend for the SANE scanner interface​
saned ! local and remote scanner, digital, video
rpms then downloaded/ran the brother install script for my printer.

Their install script then downloaded/installed additional printer
and scanner rpms. Install script asked some configuration questions
for cups and whatnot and I was up and running.

I can recommend creating an install script to do all the work.
I have found 'expect' quite handy for automagically entering data/answers
to scripts requiring input. Comes in handy for Brother installer since
it wants yes/no for various rpm install questions.
Use 'autoexpect brother_installer model_number' to generate expect script.
Then chopped it down to do work with new Brother releases.

[James Cloos]

the best way to use that scanner is to configure nfs access for it to a
directory on any linux/bsd box.

via its web ui you can cofigure its touchscreen buttons to scan to nfs.

then you just put the stack of paper in, hit to buttons on its
touchscreen and it leaves a pdf, a tiff or a jpeg in the specified
directory.

it really works best as a walk-up device.

otoh -- i have not tested this -- afaict it looks like it supports escl
so you may be able to sane's escl backend.

-JimC
--
James Cloos <cl...@jhcloos.com> OpenPGP: 0x997A9F17ED7DAEA6

[ray]

>

Have you tried looking for a Brother driver? In the past they've done a
good job of supporting Linux with their printers.

[HASM]

> Have you tried looking for a Brother driver? In the past they've done
> a good job of supporting Linux with their printers.

Was going to post the same.

Brother has rpm and deb packages for your printer/scanner here.

https://support.brother.com/g/b/downloadtop.aspx?c=us&lang=en&prod=ads2700w_us_eu_as

I have a MFC-L2740DW and it works fine with the drivers for that model
available on their website, as a network printer/scanner.

-- HASM

[Henrik Carlqvist]

On Wed, 31 Mar 2021 02:22:01 +0000, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

> I just got a Brother ADS-2700W sheet-fed scanner and am trying to access
> it from xsane.

As far as I can see it is not listed at
http://www.sane-project.org/sane-mfgs.html#Z-BROTHER

So most likely you will have to resort to some other solution than sane/
xsane to scan documents from that scanner.

regards Henrik

[David W. Hodgins]

Try looking at https://www.brother.ee/support/ads-2700w/downloads

I haven't followed it further than that page to see what it leads to.

Regards, Dave Hodgins

--
Change dwho...@nomail.afraid.org to davidw...@teksavvy.com for
email replies.

[Carlos E.R.]

On 31/03/2021 04.22, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
> I just got a Brother ADS-2700W sheet-fed scanner and am trying
> to access it from xsane.

...

> I'm beginning to wonder, though, whether fashions are changing.
> Scanners nowadays seem to want to push data to a server, rather
> than being commanded to scan by a computer. Is this really
> happening? If so, whither (or should that be "wither") xsane?

What type of server? If it is just a file server of some type, that will
probably means a Windows shared directory, that is, Samba. Or maybe a
NAS. You could prepare this in Linux, if they document it somewhere.

Or is it a server "in the cloud out there"?

>
> If anyone has gotten one of these newfangled machines to work
> as a slave, rather than a master, please share your secrets.

Sorry, no. But I'm curious about that "server" idea. It would make sense
for an office, as a shared independent machine, same as the office printer.

--
Cheers, Carlos.

[Charlie Gibbs]

On 2021-04-01, Carlos E.R. <robin_...@es.invalid> wrote:

> On 31/03/2021 04.22, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>
>> I just got a Brother ADS-2700W sheet-fed scanner and am trying
>> to access it from xsane.
> ...
>
>> I'm beginning to wonder, though, whether fashions are changing.
>> Scanners nowadays seem to want to push data to a server, rather
>> than being commanded to scan by a computer. Is this really
>> happening? If so, whither (or should that be "wither") xsane?
>
> What type of server? If it is just a file server of some type, that will
> probably means a Windows shared directory, that is, Samba. Or maybe a
> NAS. You could prepare this in Linux, if they document it somewhere.
>
> Or is it a server "in the cloud out there"?

Take your pick. It can also do e-mail and [S]FTP.

>> If anyone has gotten one of these newfangled machines to work
>> as a slave, rather than a master, please share your secrets.
>
> Sorry, no. But I'm curious about that "server" idea. It would make sense
> for an office, as a shared independent machine, same as the office printer.

That's why I'm wondering whether there's been a philosophical shift
in people's view of a scanner. I've tried to get SFTP going, but
I haven't managed to get it to accept my server's public key yet.

I worry about my wife and her Macbook, though. It seems to be
into the old computer-driven mindset. I'll have to dig deeper
to find out whether the gods, looking down from their Olympian
mountain top near Cupertino, approve of the server paradigm.

If all else fails it scans to a thumb drive just fine.

[Carlos E.R.]

On 01/04/2021 19.31, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
> On 2021-04-01, Carlos E.R. <robin_...@es.invalid> wrote:
>> On 31/03/2021 04.22, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>>
>>> I just got a Brother ADS-2700W sheet-fed scanner and am trying
>>> to access it from xsane.
>> ...
>>
>>> I'm beginning to wonder, though, whether fashions are changing.
>>> Scanners nowadays seem to want to push data to a server, rather
>>> than being commanded to scan by a computer. Is this really
>>> happening? If so, whither (or should that be "wither") xsane?
>>
>> What type of server? If it is just a file server of some type, that will
>> probably means a Windows shared directory, that is, Samba. Or maybe a
>> NAS. You could prepare this in Linux, if they document it somewhere.
>>
>> Or is it a server "in the cloud out there"?
>
> Take your pick. It can also do e-mail and [S]FTP.

If it accepts local mail, you can set up an internal mail server.

>
>>> If anyone has gotten one of these newfangled machines to work
>>> as a slave, rather than a master, please share your secrets.
>>
>> Sorry, no. But I'm curious about that "server" idea. It would make sense
>> for an office, as a shared independent machine, same as the office printer.
>
> That's why I'm wondering whether there's been a philosophical shift
> in people's view of a scanner. I've tried to get SFTP going, but
> I haven't managed to get it to accept my server's public key yet.

Maybe the key has to be certain set of types or sizes.

> I worry about my wife and her Macbook, though. It seems to be
> into the old computer-driven mindset. I'll have to dig deeper
> to find out whether the gods, looking down from their Olympian
> mountain top near Cupertino, approve of the server paradigm.
>
> If all else fails it scans to a thumb drive just fine.

Yes, there is that.


--
Cheers, Carlos.

[Charlie Gibbs]

Here's more in the ongoing saga, cross-posted from the
debian-users mailing list...

On Fri Apr 2 09:26:58 2021 "Alexander V. Makartsev" <avb...@gmail.com>
wrote:

> All things considered, it might be indeed easier to setup FTP/SFTP or
> CIFS (Samba) server on your PC and create a scanner profile to scan
> directly into FTP directory or SMB share.

I've arrived at that conclusion myself. I was hoping that I could use
NFS - and even finally tracked down and corrected a problem in my NFS
server, which hadn't been working for a long time (I had typed a period
instead of a comma in /etc/exports). It doesn't look like NFS is an
option, but at least I got my server going again, so it wasn't a total
waste if tune.

I looked for information on sane-airscan, but I couldn't find anything
really meaningful, and it just didn't give a good feeling in my gut.

It looks like SFTP is the way to go - if I can only get it to work.
There are a few frustrating gaps in the documentation of the profile
setup screen.

First of all, when filling out the "host address" box the Brother web
site says "type the Host Address or the IP address, and type the path
to the folder. Do not type a slash symbol at the beginning of the path."
Why not have a separate field for the path? If I must combine them,
how do I do so? How does the system tell where the IP address ends
and the path begins? Why is a leading slash prohibited? I'd think
it was essential. I'd expect a standard notation like
192.168.0.5:/home/cjg/scans
but it doesn't like that. I eventually found that
192.168.0.5home/cjg/scans
was accepted, even though my intuition screams out that it's wrong.
For that matter,
192.168.0.5/home/cjg/scans
is accepted too, even though it has that leading slash that I'm
not supposed to enter.

This brings me to the next problem: authentication. I've selected
"password" and typed in the user ID and password I use on my
computer. But then we get to that "Server Public Key" entry.
The web site says "Select the authentication type from the
Server Public Key drop-down list." This is misleading; it seems
to be not a list of types, but rather a list of public keys.
So off I go to the "Server Public Key" screen under the Network
tab and select "Import Server Public Key". Aha - there's "Select
the server public key file", complete with a "Browse" button.
Unfortunately, the file browser in my web browser (Seamonkey)
is brain-damaged: it won't let me type in a filespec, and
the .ssh directory is hidden. OK, copy .ssh/id_rsa.pub to
my home directory and select it from there. That gets it
onto the server public key list. Back to the profile setup
screen, where id_rsa.pub now shows up under "Server Public
Key". Click "Submit". "Would you like to test your SFTP
settings?" I click Yes, it goes away for a few seconds,
then comes up with "authentication error".

By this time it was well past midnight, so I declared the
process a dead end. Has anyone else managed to set up SFTP?

In the meantime, I figured I'd fall back to sneakernet.
I plugged a thumb drive into the scanner's USB port,
selected "Scan to USB", dropped 40 sheets of paper into
the feeder, and told it to do a double-sided scan at 300
dpi. It quickly feed the sheets through, occasionally
pausing to digest, and in the end I wound up with a
good-looking 80-page PDF file.

Emboldened by this, I went into the advanced options
and turned on "Continuous scan", then dropped in the
first part of a 300-page manual. Once the sheets
were scanned, the scanner asked me whether I had
more; I put in the next bundle of sheets, said yes,
and away it went. All was well until partway through
the last set of pages - on about page 280 the scanner
halted with an error message saying it had run out of
space. A sheet was half-fed, the PDF file was incomplete
and therefore corrupt, and a second file was created
which contained garbage left over from a previously
deleted file. That's not graceful - the least it
could have done was closed off the file cleanly.
The 2GB thumb drive was only 3% full. (Maybe the
limit is internal to the scanner.) For now I'll
assume a limit of 200 pages per file, and use
pdfunite to put the pieces together in the computer.

[James Cloos]

>>>>> "CG" == Charlie Gibbs <cgi...@kltpzyxm.invalid> writes:

CG> That's why I'm wondering whether there's been a philosophical shift
CG> in people's view of a scanner. I've tried to get SFTP going, but
CG> I haven't managed to get it to accept my server's public key yet.

AFAICT the scanner is incompatible with modern versions of openssh.

they probably only tested vs archaic versions or windows stuff...

[Charlie Gibbs]

On 2021-04-04, James Cloos <cl...@jhcloos.com> wrote:

> Charlie Gibbs <cgi...@kltpzyxm.invalid> writes:
>
>> That's why I'm wondering whether there's been a philosophical shift

>> in people's view of a scanner. I've tried to get SFTP going, but

>> I haven't managed to get it to accept my server's public key yet.
>
> AFAICT the scanner is incompatible with modern versions of openssh.
>
> they probably only tested vs archaic versions or windows stuff...

Oh well. Even if it wasn't for that, the setup screen is
sufficiently counter-intuitive to block my progress anyway.
For now, though, I'm scanning up a storm - to a thumb drive.
Then I plug that thumb drive into my Linux box, where it's
grabbed by the Windows XP VM that I'm running under VirtualBox.
From there I transfer it over to the Linux side (ironically,
via SFTP). It works well enough for me not to want to spend
much more time on it. It _is_ a nice little offline scanner,
though.

[James Cloos]

i went with regular ftp, using one of the ftp daemo's offerred by the
linux dist i use on my workstation.

ideal would be to store the scans on a central nfs box, though still
probably using ftp to get them there. but i never got such a box
installed before the strokes....

(on a private lan, ftp's lack of encryption is less of an issue.)