Sharing a Multifunction Printer/Scanner Over Network

ph4t3

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Hi.

So I have an ubuntu server running in my household and I managed to share my printer (Canon MP250) to the rest of the Windows machines (using Samba).

However, I can't quite figure out how to share the scanner (yes the MP250 is a multifunction device). I've attempted SANE with the sanetwain (front end for windows) but that doesn't quite seem to work.

Right now I've resorted to VNC'ing into the ubuntu server and using the scanner app there which dumps files to a shared folder. Sigh. This is a pain.

Does anyone perhaps know how to share the scanner? It would make my holidays that much happier. :D
 
Share the printer (done in file and printer sharing options)on the pc where it is installed.
Then point other PCs to that PC for printing. IE that printer linked PC must always be on else others cannot print.

Sorry posting from mobile else I could describe in more detail.
 
I have conflicting results in my case of the above.

I can see/access the one scanner but not the other - the one I can see is a brand new all-in-one (Canon), while the other one is 3 or 4 years old.

(In my case, all are on Win 7/8)
 
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I had a similar issue with a friends printer - possibly even same model.
Printer was connected to siemens router (usb). All network connected devices could print (only).
Turned out that as the printer was not purpose designed "network" printer, if configured to share / network the printer, the multi-function features were not supported.
Maybe you will have better luck and figure your way around it.
I got irritated and gave up thinking "what is the purpose of networking a scanner when you have to go to the thing to feed it documents in any event" :D
 
I had a similar story a year or so back, also with a multi-function printer. I gave up after going through the same motions and just scanned all the images into a networked folder for simplicity. Thankfully there weren't any privacy issues, but the scanner couldn't select which folder to put the file into, so everyone had to do it manually.
 
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