[ale] It works, it works, hurray w00t!!

[Charles Shapiro]

This thanksgiving weekend I managed to bring up the home-network
scanner/printer server, with a home-built web-based scanner interface that
you can talk to from a browser (long's you're on my network, of course). The
finished system lets you scan documents and photographs into a variety of
formats and lets you rotate the scans by 90 degrees either way on the box,
so you can scan landscape-mode stuff without having to turn your head at
your monitor.  Propers to Jim Kinney for providing the hardware in return
for a 6-pack of rather inferior homebrew.  I hope he's a hero to his wife
for getting rid of the old machine and scanner, as I sort-of am to mine for
getting it to work.

I used Puppy Linux ( http://puppylinux.org ) , haX04ed up to keep X from
starting. Puppy comes with a pretty impressive desktop setup (I think it's
fvwm-based) including the SeaMonkey browser, a pretty ok text editor called
"geany", and an assortment of video//spreadsheet//contact manager//chat
applications which I didn't even try.
Getting it installed and booting off your hard drive can be kind of a bear.
I installed the Gimp, python 2.3, the Monkey web server, sshd, and
ImageMagick for the project.  I also wrote some startup scripts to kick off
httpd and sshd at boot.  The scanner server app itself is about 100 lines of
python code and maybe another 150 lines or so of html, shell scripts, and
other various setup junque, which took me a total of 10 or 15 hours spread
out over a week or so to make work. So far I've kept the number of
adjustments to the actual scan (done with scanimage(1), of course) to just a
few (resolution, color/lineart/grayscale) but I might add more dials &
numbers if it seems fun or useful.

Off-hand I'd say that Puppy is great for strictly intranet-based servers,
but probably Bad for anything exposed to the public, since everything runs
as root, the console automatically logs you on at power-up, and there's no
root password as shipped. Bob Toxen I'm sure is shocked, as I should be. It
doesn't look too terribly hard to fix the proximate setup for this, but I
shudder at  the permissions horrors which await the brave traveler who
ventures down this path.

Hardware is an old E-Machines 733i etower, holding an Intel Celeron 733, an
ATA-33 16-gb drive, and 64 mb of PC100 RAM.  It's just enough to support
either a development environment or the application, but not both. I had to
finish my coding from ssh on another machine.   The scanner is an old UMAX
Astra 610S, with a maximum resulution of 300 dpi, connected through a SCSI
card which uses the aic7xxx driver. I have another cast-off SCSI scanner in
the house which may or may not work, but now that I know the rest of the
setup is ok I'll probably try hooking that one up soon.

The next arduous steps are to figure out some furniture to put the finished
system on (I spent a good 2 hours cleaning &  re-arranging a place for it on
Friday), and finding a technical and political solution to powering it.  The
wife of course wants to simply leave it on all the time, but I think that's
bad practice. OTOH, I don't necessarily want to have to go turn it on every
time I want to use it.  There's a wake-on-lan choice in the BIOS, but a
quick scan of the Net of a Thousand Lies doesn't show any hints on making
that work on an etower. I've got an X-10 CM17a "firecracker" module bangin'
around the house, so maybe a real solution will involve that handy gizmo.
Another possibility is just a timer-based switch that'll turn it on when
we're at home and awake but off when we're out or asleep. ACPI works fine,
so turning it off from where I sit or from cron(8) isn't a problem.

I could theoretically do an ALE presentation on the whole setup if there's
interest. I've got some notes on the project under "SettngUpSprat" (note no
"i") on the ALE wiki.

-- CHS
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...