TLDR: What protocol do network scanners use, and how do I use that to set up a Linux scan server to OS X client?
I have a Brother DCP-7065DN laser printer/scanner. It's great. It's connected to the network through its native 10/100 port and we use it to print and scan from our computers (Macs running 10.8).
When we scan over the network, it goes VERY slowly because it is bottle-necked by the 10/100 network connection (100mbps is somewhere around 1/3 of the speed of USB 2.0).
That got me thinking, what if we connected it by USB to our server and set it up as a print/scan server? The server is an Ubuntu box running 14.04 LTS, and right now it just does file and Plex serving. I got CUPS set up beautifully for the printer side of things; then I tried to set up the scanning.
I started with SANE. Once it was configured I was able to do local scanning just fine (quickly too!). I installed the TWAIN-SANE interface for OS X only to discover that OS X has dismal TWAIN support. The native Image Capture app wouldn't recognize the shared scanner. I couldn't find a third party scanning app that would work (VueScan didn't), except for OpenOffice. Not a convenient way to scan PDFs or images, but it proved that the sharing worked.
Anyways, this is all a long-winded way to get to my main question: what does the printer use to do it's native scanner sharing? Whatever protocol it is works great with OS X clients with the natively bundled drivers. Is there a way that I can emulate this from a Linux server?
