[SOLVED] Network Scanner working in antiX-17 NOT in antiX-19

[Member stevesr0]

(Second attempt – first one vanished??)
Two antiX systems:
Network Brother MFC-7345N connected via ethernet.
Older computer running antiX-17 full. Simple-scan and xsane work fine.
Newer computer running antiX-19 full. Neither produce images. The apps launch and both detect the scanner.
brscan-skey -l on the older computer gives its status as “active”; on the newer computer, it is listed as “Not responded”.

I have searched the internet, this forum and the Brother site, but I am not clear how to proceed.

Appreciate any suggestions and will happily perform any tests suggested.

stevesr0

• This topic was modified 1 year, 2 months ago by Brian Masinick. Reason: Marked SOLVED by request

[Member afghan]

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Can you check if libnss-mdns is installed on your system?

Beware of people who knows nothing; they are the ones that won't know that they know nothing.

[Member Robin]

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Possibly you need to put a line like
brother3
again into your file
/etc/sane.d/dll.conf
it might have been removed or not been correctly installed along with your scanner driver during a system update.

The line might also read brother2, brother4 or whatever, depending what brother sane driver you have in use.

Or the brother sane module wasn’t installed correctly at all.

for further details see a discussion at unix.stackexchange.

Most important sentence from this thread is probably:

Depending on the distro, the problem may be missing dependencies.

I do emphasize this, since I have seen some programs already in debian and antiX with missing dependencies, one of them is gaupol, and it was skidoo who pointed me to the missing lib which simply wasn’t installed by the installer package while it was (or better: should have been) a dependency and kept gaupol from correct working. Wouldn’t have figured this never on my own.

But it might also possible assigning a static IP to your scanner is enough already to solve your problem.

So, best would be, you’d read and check all the answers in the thread I’ve linked yourself, there are some different approaches described. All of them claim to have solved the issue, so this problem can obviously arise from different causes, all of them connected with the brother drivers packages not installing completely, so the one or the other lib or setting is missing in the end.

Disclaimer: I don’t have a brother printer, so all what I can tell you is what I’ve found on internet research on this.

Windows is like a submarine. Open a window and serious problems will start.

[Member stevesr0]

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Thanks for responses. I have checked out your suggestions – unfortunately without success so far.

to afghan – I did (and do) have libnss-mdns installed.

to robin – I added the line brother3 to that file and after rebooting, no change. I looked thru the UNIX.Stackexchange link and tried the suggestions. After rebooting, no change.

I keep looking for differences between the setup on the working system and this one. So far noticed only that in that one the sane daemon is not started in the the conf file, whereas I have it set up to launch automatically in SysV (which I am using on both machines). I just killed the sane daemon and that didn’t change simple-scan’s behavior at all.

Still seeking enlightenment, in spite of having a working system on the same network to use as a reference.

I feel quite ignorant…

stevesr0

[Member afghan]

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I recall having similar problems a long time ago where xsane could detect the network scanners but cannot communicate with it to scan. Unfortunately I can’t remember what I did, or even what the cause was. I vaguely remember that it was some config file problem, or something along that line.

Try looking into /etc/sane.d/ to see if you have any Brother config file installed there. If you’re using the sane daemon, then there’s a saned.conf file there where you can tweak IP addresses of something like that for network scanners.

I currently use Epson printer/scanners with the driverless model, so I don’t even have the sane daemon running and there are no config files anymore (that I know of).

• This reply was modified 1 year, 2 months ago by afghan.

Beware of people who knows nothing; they are the ones that won't know that they know nothing.

[Member ModdIt]

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Hi stevesr0
for my Brother MFC-j6710, multiarch, 32 bit support was needed
Scanning with the brother utility has never worked correctly with my device and setup and is somewhat limited.
Same applies to simple scan.
I have been using X Sane on my setup for years, which at least for me just works.

Try and scan from the terminal to see if you get error messages, that has helped me on multiple occasions.

[Member stevesr0]

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UPDATE: SOLVED!! I am not 100% sure, but I MAY have used the wrong ip address for the scanner. The other thing I did before I rebooted and found it was working on the antiX-19 system was to delete duplicate entries for the scanner and use the same name on all the machines. On my Sid system, simple-scan is still not working, so there may be something in all the “twiddling” I have done that does make a difference. I will update my findings after I check the remaining differences between the working vs the (as yet) not working computers.

Thanks for all comments to date.

stevesr0

——————————————————-

(I cannot mark this as solved, as my first post no longer shows an edit choice. So Moderator, please mark as “SOLVED?”)

Hi moddit,

Thanks for response.

I do have the multiarch-support package installed. Running simple-scan and xsane from the terminal just cause the graphic versions to launch but they don’t function. They list the scanner correctly, but simple scan just circles endlessly and xsane just freezes from the launch window that shows my scanners after pressing ok.

This multifunction printer/fax/scanner has worked well with the default Brother install as a printer. Don’t recall trying to use it as a fax. As a scanner, I think I had it functioning on my current Sid machine when it was running antiX-16 and it is working well with my machine running antiX-17.

I am cross checking the different files installed on the two machines currently to see if I can see what the issue(s) is(are), but so far no clarity.

The working system is able to use simple-scan and xsane without the sane daemon running.

I just installed simple-scan on my Sid system – that detects the scanner as active, but it still didn’t work. I will go back today and see if there are things I can tweak on that machine. If that doesn’t help, then I note there is an upgraded installer from Brother, that might make things work.

Thank goodness, scanning is working on one of my systems.

Again, ALL (nice) suggestions appreciated.

stevesr0

• This reply was modified 1 year, 2 months ago by stevesr0.

[Member stevesr0]

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Update #2.

Two working as noted above, third on (Fujitsu running Sid) still can’t get simple-scan to connect to the scanner, although the model is detected.

Peculiarly, simple-scan runs faster (I think) on the Lenovo Yoga running antiX-17 than the O’Powered gaming laptop with a faster processor and more ram (running antiX-19).

Brother supplies the backend, rather than sane, so saned doesn’t have to be started for scanning to work. On the Lenovo, htop doesn’t show saned as an active process, but on the other two systems one working and one not working) it is active. Notably, the configuration files for saned are the same in both working systems, so apparently the status of saned is not critical.

Appreciate any thoughts; happy to describe any specific details.

stevesr0

[Member afghan]

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Ahhh…Now you have reminded me the problem I had before. It was the IP address configuration and there were duplicate Epson conf files on my system, so it would work sometimes if it used the correct config file and sometimes not work if it found the wrong config file. I had to delete all other Epson config files and just keep one correct one.

Beware of people who knows nothing; they are the ones that won't know that they know nothing.

[Member stevesr0]

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Hi afghan,

I haven’t seen any evidence of duplicate config files and the ip address I am getting back with brscan-skey -l is correct.

Still thrashing thru the three computers looking for differences that might make a difference. So far, nothing obvious.

If I get really desperate I will try an uninstall and a reinstall…

But that if successful would probably leave me not knowing what was wrong.

stevesr0

[Member stevesr0]

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Problems solved for ALL three computers.

At this point, after many adjustments that hadn’t enabled scanning (but some of which might have been required <g>), debug revealed that the Brother installer hadn’t installed a package needed for scanning to work (this was libusb-0.1-4). Immediately after install, without reboot, scanning worked.

Parenthetically, I have learned the following while struggling with this:
1. When the device is attached to the network thru a router by ethernet, rather than to a computer, the saned daemon should NOT be run.
2. In recent versions of sane, the settings that would have enabled or disabled saned in /etc/default/saned and /etc/init.d/saned are IGNORED. One can use sudo sysv-rc-conf sane stop to disable it.
3. There are a few sites that have active discussions of sane related issues – including the sane project gitlab site, the sane-devel maillist and the sane-airscan github site.
4. generally, printing is easier to set up than scanning on multifunction devices.

Hope some of that is useful for others.

stevesr0

[Member afghan]

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As far as I know saned daemon is required only if you want to share a scanner connected directly (most likely USB) to a PC. It allows others on the network to scan through that PC. If your scanner is directly connected to the network (as a network node, wired or wireless) then it is not required.

Also don’t confuse sane with XSane the application that does the scanning.

Beware of people who knows nothing; they are the ones that won't know that they know nothing.

[Member ModdIt]

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stevesr0 wrote generally, printing is easier to set up than scanning on multifunction devices.

I have to disagree, after setting up a lot of devices in the past years, all canon or Brother.
I have never had issues with getting scanning to work, printing another story.

The usb lib mentioned is present on all my systems, can not remember having to ever do an extra install.

[Member stevesr0]

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Hi moddit,

1. Scanner vs printer set problems. I got that impression from seeing a lot of posts that said “Printing works but not scanning” on multifunction devices.

2. I saw a thread where a person’s problem with connecting to a scanner was also because the installer hadn’t installed the libusb package, so I assumed that this might be a fault of the installer. Instead, it might reflect the lack of a “full” install of the operating system. The computer which lacked the libusb package was the only one that I “built” up from a net install. So maybe it is “expected” by the installer and if apt isn’t involved, the absence of a dependency is ignored.

Thanks for your comment.

Hi afghan,

1. Yes, I said that saned is only required when the scanner is being connected to a computer and saned has to act as the server.

2. Right, xsane and scanimage are both distinct from saned. They can be used without saned running.

stevesr0

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