No ability to give www-data or network users access to scanners or saned

[jhansonxi]

I've been doing some work with Linux Scanner Server (http://scannerserver.online02.com) and created a patch to fix some bugs on Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) i386:
http://jhansonxi.blogspot.com/2010/10/patch-for-linux-scanner-server-v12.html

It uses a shell script to run scanimage but I've encountered a problem - while normal users can access scanners without any configuration, user www-data doesn't have access to them so scanimage can't find or use them. Previously the solution to scanner access problems was to add the user to the scanner group but this no longer exists. Adding it doesn't help as the supporting UDEV rules apparently don't exist either. A commenter on my blog said to use saned. I got it working with Xsane on my test server (localhost) but could not access any scanners remotely from my workstation. The fix was to change the scanner device permissions with chmod o+rw which is a little inconvenient. As soon as this change is made both LSS and remote Xsane/scanimage users can access the scanners (LSS shows duplicates with both local devices and net devices through saned). There seems to be a general lack of documentation on how sane and device permissions are handled on Ubuntu and nobody else seems to know either:
https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/127223

Scanner permissions have been a constant problem on Ubuntu for a long time (bug #121082 etc.) If this mess doesn't get fixed you can expect to see more third-party hacks like this:
http://jhansonxi.blogspot.com/2010/10/scanner-access-enabler.html

[jhansonxi (jhansonxi)]

I have also confirmed that the permission problem affects the same scanners shared through saned. It seems that the problem affects most anything other than multifunction/AiO devices and is probably due to the changes related to the removal of the scanner group: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/hal/+bug/195782/comments/14

More discussion here:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1519201&page=2

With these scanners connected:
device `brother2:bus4;dev2' is a Brother MFC-440CN USB scanner
device `umax:/dev/sg5' is a UMAX Vista-S8 flatbed scanner
device `snapscan:libusb:002:003' is a AGFA SNAPSCAN 1212U_2 flatbed scanner
device `rts8891:libusb:004:002' is a Hewlett-Packard 4470c flatbed scanner
device `microtek:/dev/sg4' is a Microtek ScanMaker E3 flatbed scanner
device `hp:libusb:004:003' is a Hewlett-Packard ScanJet 5200C flatbed scanner
Mustek parallel port scanner at "parport0"

Only the MFC-440CN is detected by LSS without configuration. They all function after scanner-access-enabler is used.

[Rolf Leggewie (r0lf)]

does this ever occur in trusty or later?

[Rolf Leggewie (r0lf)]

We are closing this bug report because it lacks the information we need to investigate the problem, as described in the previous comments. Please reopen it if you can give us the missing information, and don't hesitate to submit bug reports in the future. To reopen the bug report you can click on the current status, under the Status column, and change the Status back to "New". Thanks again!