[sane-devel] using parallel port scanner as ordinary user in recent version of Fedora

Andre Robatino andre at bwh.harvard.edu
Sat Jul 15 18:46:51 UTC 2006


Andre Robatino wrote:
> Stéphane VOLTZ wrote:
>> Le mardi 11 juillet 2006 01:36, Andre Robatino a écrit :
>>  
>>>   My father has a Umax Astra 2000P parallel port scanner.  At present
>>> it's accessible only as root.  Before the advent of udev, it was
>>> possible to access as an ordinary user by changing the permission of
>>> /dev/parport0 from 660 to 666.  Since udev appeared in Fedora 2, 
>>> another
>>> solution is needed.  After reading sane man pages, we've done the
>>> following:
>>>
>>> 1) In /etc/sane.d/dll.conf, uncommented "umax_pp".
>>> 2) In /etc/sane.d/net.conf, uncommented "localhost".
>>> 3) In /etc/xinetd.d, created a file "sane-port" with the contents:
>>>
>>> # default: off
>>> # description: The sane server accepts requests
>>> # for network access to a local scanner via the
>>> # network.
>>> service sane-port
>>> {
>>>    port        = 6566
>>>    socket_type = stream
>>>    wait        = no
>>>    user        = root
>>>    group       = root
>>>    server      = /usr/sbin/saned
>>> }
>>>
>>>   This is copied from the template in the saned man page, with the user
>>> and group changed from saned to root, since user and group saned don't
>>> exist, and since running as root would allow direct hardware access.  I
>>> didn't add "localhost" to /etc/sane.d/sane.conf since the saned man 
>>> page
>>> says that connections from localhost are always permitted.  The file
>>> /etc/services already contains the lines
>>>
>>> sane-port       6566/tcp                        # SANE Control Port
>>> sane-port       6566/udp                        # SANE Control Port
>>>
>>> Ordinary user access still doesn't work.  What's wrong?
>>>     
>>
>>     Hello,
>>
>>     I haven't enough saned experience to tell you what might going 
>> on. But I have the feeling the trouble oyu have with /dev/parport0 
>> may just be an issue with 'ppdev' kernel module autoloading.     Can 
>> you send the debug messages of 'scanimage -L' with the environment 
>> variables SANE_DEBUG_UMAX_PP and SANE_DEBUG_UMAX_PP_LOW set to 255 ?
>> There will be traces of which device is used or not, and some 
>> informations why they are used.
>>
>> Regards,   
>>     Stef
>>   
>  I have a different scanner, and I tried "scanimage -L" with the 
> corresponding debug variable, and there was no additional output.  So 
> I think that the Fedora software isn't compiled with debug support.  
> My father is a naive user and I have to read each command over the 
> phone, so I can't ask him to compile from source.  However, we 
> determined that after running "scanimage -L" or xsane as root, the 
> ppdev and parport modules are loaded and stay loaded.  But even then, 
> it's still impossible to access the scanner as an ordinary user.  Then 
> we tried using the line "port 0x378" in umax_pp.conf, and in this case 
> the scanner can't be accessed even as root, even though the scanner is 
> definitely on /dev/parport0 (we were previously using "port 
> /dev/parport0" which allows root access).
>
>
  We finally solved the problem.  First, it turned that xinetd wasn't 
installed, even though the directory /etc/xinetd.d existed (it and the 
files in it were owned by other packages), so we installed it.  Second, 
the sane-port lines didn't exist in /etc/services in FC4, even though 
they exist in FC5, so we added those (though I don't know if it matters 
since the port was specified in /etc/xinetd.d/sane-port).  Finally, as 
you suspected, it was a problem with ppdev.  Even though ppdev can be 
loaded as an ordinary user, for some reason this wasn't happening.  So 
we just edited a config file to load ppdev at boot time.  (As an aside, 
it was possible to get debugging output by setting the DEBUG_UMAX_PP* 
variables as you suggested.  The first time I tried it, I forgot to use 
the word "export".)
  If you have any idea as to why the ppdev module fails to load 
automatically when attempting access as an ordinary user, even though it 
works as root, please let me know.  I'd like to file a bug report if it 
doesn't already exist.




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