Remote network scanner is not being detected in "scanimage -L" although being published through avahi (karmic)

[Erez]

The problem is as following: I got a HP 4400c USB Scanner connected to one machine (running karmic 64). The scanner is identified (scanimage -L) and used (xsane) without a problem. I was also able to make it accessible to another machine (also running karmic 64) by configuring saned on the server and net.conf on the client, and then solving the udev permissions issue, which seems to be mentioned in a few other bug reports - not relevant to this bug (I think).
However, later I tried to make the remote machine detect the remote scanner automatically, through avahi - without having the saned server's IP address written manually to net.conf on the client machine. That didn't work. I verified that saned on the machine with the scanner publishes a proper service messahe in avahi - and it does. However neither "scanimage -L" nor xsane are able to detect the remote scanner.
So, my question is - is the sane client configured with avahi support at all? If not - is that intentional?
The package I report this bug on is sane-utils (because of scanimage).

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: amd64
Date: Sun Jan 17 21:07:14 2010
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" - Release amd64 (20091027)
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Package: sane-utils 1.0.20-4ubuntu3
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-17.54-generic
SourcePackage: sane-backends
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-17-generic x86_64

[jhansonxi (jhansonxi)]

This might be a duplicate (or related to) Bug #456177

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Alex Vorona (alex-vorona)]

Problem is still there on Ubuntu 11.10

[Whoopie (whoopie79)]

Problem still valid for Ubuntu 12.04

[Whoopie (whoopie79)]

Here is the debug output: http://en.pastebin.ca/2299592

If I'm not wrong, the issue is that sane_get_devices is called before the scanner is found via avahi.

[Michał Sawicz (saviq)]

I can somewhat confirm this issue with 13.04 still. My log suggests that the avahi discovery succeeded, but no scanner is found.

Attached is the log from

$ SANE_DEBUG_NET=128 scanimage -L

After adding the server name to /etc/sane.d/net.conf, scanimage crashes... Will try and report a bug about it.