Howto get my Brother scanner back to work

[mbohets]

In Kubuntu 15.10 I dont get my scanner up & running anymore.
It is a multifunctional scanner/printer/fax.

In previous versions I always used this procedure
- cd to the directory where you downloaded the drivers
- sudo dpkg -i --force-all brscan4-0.4.1-3.i386.deb (install scanner driver)
- dpkg -l | grep Brother (check if the driver is effectively installed)
- brsaneconfig4 -a name=brother9970 model=MFC-9970CDW ip=192.168.1.200
To change the scanner IP adres, do the following
- sudo kate /usr/local/Brother/sane/brsanenetdevice4.cfg and change the IP adress
- sudo saned restart (restart the sane deamon to activate the new settings)
sudo service saned restart in newer Ubuntu versions

When I start a scan program now (gscan2 pdf or another one) I get the message that there is no device found.
I can ping the scanner/printer, and I can print also.
When I try to restart saned, I get this (never seen this in previous buntu versions)
marc@marcHP8470:~$ sudo service saned restart
[sudo] password for marc:
Failed to restart saned.service: Unit saned.service is masked.
marc@marcHP8470:~$ systemctl status saned
● saned.service
Loaded: masked (/dev/null)
Active: inactive (dead)

marc@marcHP8470:~$ sudo systemctl unmask saned
marc@marcHP8470:~$ sudo service saned restart
Failed to restart saned.service: Unit saned.service is masked.


When I run brsaneconfig, It tells me that the scanner is already registered

I had to fire up my work laptop and use Windows to get some documents scanned

[zeeone]

Used search engine "Duckduckgo" and the first hit was this;

http://ask.xmodulo.com/install-broth...ter-linux.html

It can be this easy or not.

[claydoh]

Used search engine "Duckduckgo" and the first hit was this;

http://ask.xmodulo.com/install-broth...ter-linux.html

It can be this easy or not.

As the OP has had success previously, I would assume he has used these instructions already, or similar. The likely problem is that saned, the scanner networking daemon looks to be broken in the sane-utils version in *buntu since 15.04, and maybe in the same version in Debian as well.

[mbohets]

Indeed, I followed the instructions from the Brother site, and it worked well for years.

Now I installed Kubuntu 15.10 and it does not work anymore, and I get this "Unit saned.service is masked" error when I try to restart the sane deamon.
I skipped some versions in order to get a workable kde 5 version, but it seems not everything is ironed out yet.
I suppose it has something to do with the switch to systemd.

Fortunately my MFP also does scan to e-mail, so I don't have to use my work laptop each time I need to scan a document.
I hate it when an upgrade results in a feature downgrade

Any hope that this will be fixed in 16.04 ?
or could I try to download and compile saned myself ?

[claydoh]

I don't know, there is little in the way of bug reporting anywhere, rather few are reporting it - network scanning via saned daemon may not be that popular?


It may be fixed, or not, but i can't tell. I am casually looking into this as it does affect me though I scan very rarely, though I used to have my printer-scanner shared via my Kodi home theater PC and scanning worked as expected after setting it up, until Wily.

[oshunluvr]

Scanner setups have changed a bit over the years. For network scanning you need to have your local subnet in /etc/sane.d/net.conf like this:

stuart@office:~$ cat /etc/sane.d/net.conf 
# This is the net backend config file.


## net backend options
# Timeout for the initial connection to saned. This will prevent the backend
# from blocking for several minutes trying to connect to an unresponsive
# saned host (network outage, host down, ...). Value in seconds.
# connect_timeout = 60


## saned hosts
# Each line names a host to attach to.
# If you list "localhost" then your backends can be accessed either
# directly or through the net backend.  Going through the net backend
# may be necessary to access devices that need special privileges.
# localhost
192.168.1.0/24

and make sure your scanner driver is listed in /etc/sane.d/dll.conf and does not have an # in front of it.

[mbohets]

No luck adding the subnet to /etc/sane.d/net.conf
As I cannot restart saned because it is masked, I rebooted the PC entirely

Any idea where this masked thing comes from ?
marc@marcHP8470:~$ sudo systemctl status saned
[sudo] password for marc:
● saned.service
Loaded: masked (/dev/null)
Active: inactive (dead)

marc@marcHP8470:~$ ps -edf | grep sane
marc 2786 2723 0 20:31 pts/1 00:00:00 grep --color=auto sane

It looks like sane is not even running

[claydoh]

Well I had used this as my tutorial
https://feeding.cloud.geek.nz/posts/...er-using-sane/
using the stock sane stuff, and skipping the firewall config bit

It did not work previously, but that was probably when the HTPC I am using as the server was running Vivid, somewhat recently upgraded to wily.
My Xenial laptop finds the scanner and scans now.

Note the section relating to systemd, you need to do that to get this init system to enable the service. I did NOT have to reboot as I did not get the 'masked' error.

[oshunluvr]

what does ll /etc/systemd/system |grep saned show?

[oshunluvr]

Also, /etc/default/saned needs to have RUN=no in it.

[mbohets]

IT WORKS YESSSS

Thanks for your help.

Because of reading in all the links, I decided to do a step by step check of all things I found there,
and one of the things is revisit the Brother driver site to see if I have the correct ones,
and saw there that Brother now has a single installation script
instead of the different debs + config file instructions I used in the past.

So I downloaded the installation script.
It downloads the debs with wget as I did before manually, but does some extra configuration stuff in all kinds of
cups and sane configuration files on top of installing the drivers.