Setting Up Sprat

Hardware

• Emachines etower 733i : Celeron 733, 64 mb RAM, 15 GB disk. I pulled the Windows Modem and added a SCSI card. Would be nice to have another 64-mb memory stick that works.
• Adaptec SCSI card (aic7xxx driver)
• UMAX Astra 610S scanner

Software

• Puppy Linux 3.10
  • Installed on hard drive (must use "ram only fs" option on boot)
    • Manually partitioned hard drive
    • Installed with puppy auto-installer after partitioning.
  • Installed monkey web server. Added /etc/rc.d start script for monkey web server
  • Installed python 2.4 . Still missing libdb dependency
  • Disabled auto-start of X Windows in /etc/profile
  • Installed sane_backend-1.0.17, because sane_backend-1.0.18 cannot work (lacks /etc/sane.d, may be miscompiled, symptom is that sane-find-scanner sees the scanner, but scanimage -L does not). sane_backend-1.0.17 requires libgphoto2, won't run with missing .so file.

To Do

• Write python cgi-bin script to control scanner
• Figure out where to put in house
• Add to local name server (Done 18 Nov 2007)
  • Changed /etc/host to "sprat", added domain and search to /etc/resolv.conf. Added name and IP to local nameserver files on colt
• Make sure dhcpcd is not running on boot (Done 18 Nov 2007)
• Figure out how to ensure that scanner is detected ( Done 18 Nov 2007)
  • "echo "scsi add-single-device 1 0 5 0" > /proc/scsi/scsi" command does not work with my driver. rmmod(8) and modprobe(8) of aic7xxx detects a powered-on scanner but increments SCSI bus number each time. This doesn't appear to affect /dev/sg0 or scanimage -L however.
• Make sure sshd is running ( Done 22 Nov 2007)
  • Installed Openssh-4.4p1.pup from dotpups.de (which was up, for a miracle).
  • Had to password-protect root and manually create a "ssh" user
  • Had to generate machine keys manually with ssh-keygen
  • Wrote 80sshd.sh startup script in /etc/init.d
• Fix init.d scripts to write properly to console on startup/shutdown ( Done 22 Nov 2007)
  • Add "echo -en" with escape codes to get "Starting...." and "done" messages to display on scripts running.
• Install libgphoto through package manager (Not feasible 18 Nov 2007)
  • Install packages are not simply .tar.gz packages.
• Experiment with monster flat-bed scanner
  • It is a scsi scanner with a centronics 50 connector set. I have a db50->centronics cable, but need a centronics scsi terminator. It may be scsi 1.
• Install imagemagick for image conversions (Done 18 Nov 2007)
  • Installed from slackware package by "tar -xzvf" ing it from / and then running install/doinstall.sh script. Scary but it worked (this time)
  • Used "convert" to make .jpg file from scanned .tiff image.
• Change from "Puppy is shutting down" to "sprat is shutting down" (Done 18 Nov 2007)
• Installed libdb-4.4 trying to fix python dependency -- doesn't appear to have worked but might just need a symlink. ( 18 Nov 2007 )

Development

• The machine doesn't have enough muscle to support both a development environment and the application. I had to finish coding with e3vi from ssh. The system appears stable with just monkey running, but with X, monkey, a browser and a couple of terminal windows open it stops responding when the scanner application is run from a browser. I can see the app running in top(1), but it never actually starts the scanner or returns a page.
• It is "Content-Type: text/html\n\n", not anything else. Anything but two newline characters will confuse heck out of your browser.
• monkey appears to have Troubles processing URL argument lines ("foo://foo/bar?a+b+c"). To code around this I call a script which passes the appropriate arguments to my application, and the application looks for a web page ("cgi.FormFields()") and processes arguments iff it doesn't find any form variables set.
• Leaving off the last > from <options/> worked fine from firefox, but caused safari to hork the page.
• The "resolution" choice on scanimage(1) changes the size of the output image.

To Do

• Make a table to hold the server and the scanner(s)
• Plug the other scanner into the server.
• Figure out how to power on and off in the house.
• Hook some printers up and make CUPS work