In 2010 my wife and I decided to buy a fancy all-in-one, networked, laser printer and scanner. We were tired of the long, onerous tasks of cleaning ink cartridges and walking over to the scanner to plug in our laptops. A person can only take so much.

After extensive research we settled on a Xerox Phaser 6128MFP. It was a color printer with built-in ethernet. Scanning wrote files directly to a shared drive or sent them over email. It wasn’t cheap, but clearly this was the device for us. After a few minutes on Newegg it was ours.

For nearly a year, all was well. We scanned. We printed. A few times in color at first, to prove that it worked, and then mostly in black-and-white so as not to be wasteful.

Then in August, 2011 we decided to upgrade our laptops. Snow Leopard was clearly not fierce enough and we needed to move to Lion. I had waited a full month after release to upgrade in an attempt to avoid major problems. There were a few complaints online, but overall it seemed like a safe upgrade.

Of course, after installing Lion we ran into problems. Low and behold, Apple had chosen to discontinue support for the NetBIOS session protocol including SMB over NetBIOS. Its as if they thought a protocol from 1987 wasn’t good enough any more. This broke networked scanning for many people, including us.

No problem, I thought, I’ll just switch to the email delivery method instead. I soon discovered, however, that the Xerox firmware only supports sending email over unencrypted SMTP. Besides the obvious security concerns, this would not work because both my wife and I use gmail which requires SSL/TSL.

This left us with only a few solutions:

  1. Try configuration changes reported to have varying levels of success.
  2. Install and configure Samba on both our laptops.
  3. Setup a linux server on our home network to server as an SMTP MTA or file server.
  4. Walk over to the scanner and plug the USB cable into the laptop.

After careful consideration I have chosen to try something completely different:

I’m now working on a Node.js server to receive scanned files over NetBIOS/SMB and push them up to Dropbox.

Ultimately I’d like to host this server on an embedded device like a Raspberry Pi, Soekris, or Gumstix. To make it easier to deploy on these platforms I’m working towards a pure JavaScript implementation.

While not the most direct solution, it has a number of benefits:

  • Provides a permanent solution that is uncoupled from our chosen laptop operating systems.
  • Gives me the opportunity to learn more about node.js, JavaScript, and some new (to me) protocols. I’d rather learn about these things than configuration files.
  • Allows me to contribute some code and get more involved with the node.js community.
  • Could potentially provide a foundation for integrating any number of legacy devices and applications. There are undoubtedly small business and enterprise IT shops trying to figure out how to tie their aging, legacy equipment into fancy new cloud services. Perhaps this code will be helpful.

I figure as long as I am starting a project, I might as well start a blog as well. While all the code is hosted on GitHub, I’ll periodically post more updates on my progress here. The next post will be coming soon and will cover proxying NetBIOS sessions using node.js.