Scanning TO a Linux system?

[Joseph Sinclair]

If you use a Windows or Mac machine to do the setup, you can use the scan-to-email-server function to send the PDF via email to your Linux box (just set the Linux box as the server and run a limited SMTP service with local-only delivery).

Otherwise, you're basically out of luck, their network scanner support is mostly in their host software, and they don't have that for Linux (although their SANE driver will work across the network, with the Linux computer initiating the scan).

Kurt Granroth wrote:
> Okay, I know this is a long shot, but it's worth asking.
> 
> I recently bought a kick-ass networked color laser multi-function (copy,
> scan, fax) printer.  It's a Brother MFC-9420CN.  Brother has much better
> than average Linux support for nearly all of the features.  That is, you
> can download printer and scanner drivers directly from the Brother
> website and they have support docs and everything.  Printing and
> scanning all work great with an ease of use that parallels Windows and
> OSX (to a degree).  Very nice.
> 
> But I'm greedy.  I want *everything* to work.  The MFC-9420CN has a
> unique (to me) feature in which you can scan pages at the printer and it
> will automatically send them over the network to your computer.  That
> is, I have an OS X system in my living room and the printer in my
> office.  I have the Brother software running on OS X that has a pre-set
> directory specified for the remote scanning.  I then take a stack of
> pages to be scanned in (I'm converting all of my old utility bills to
> PDF so I can shred the originals) and feed them into the document
> feeder.  I then specify (by name) which computer I want them sent to.
> Then I press the Scan button... it scans them all... and sends the
> resulting PDF to the pre-set directory on my OS X computer.  I can then
> take another stack and repeat the process.  It makes scanning large
> quantities of papers very efficient since I don't have to keep going
> back and forth between the computer and the scanner/printer.  Cool, eh?
> 
> Well, Brother ships the control software (server software, I guess) for
> both OS X and Windows but not for Linux.  Their Linux support may be
> better than average, but it's far from perfect.  What I'm wondering if
> there is something like this out there that would allow me to setup my
> Linux system as the "server".  Honestly, before I got this printer, I
> didn't even know such a feature existed so it never occurred to me.
> 
> I checked out 'saned' but that looks like it does the opposite of what I
> want.  That is, it allows you to turn a USB or parallel scanner into a
> network scanner.  Well, my scanner is already networked.  Somehow I need
> to get my Linux box to be an automatic client of sorts.
> 
> Does anybody know anything about something like this?