HowTo Scanners on Linux(Raspberry Pi) – Project SANE

It turns out, even old scanners has a function in the modern era, thanks to our brothers and sisters at the SANE project.

For printers, you have CUPS and for scanners you have SANE

They pretty much saves the day if you don’t want to have a dedicated Windows PC just for scanning or printing every once in a while. As the world shifts to the full digital age, it’s less and less common to perform these tasks.

But as we all know; when you need the old hardware to work, you need it badly. Printers are not famous for being very trustworthy or stable. Because after all, the manufacturers make money on the ink and not on good hardware. It’s a perfect study-case for a tiny Raspberry Pi, as these tasks don’t require much horsepower.

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HowTo: Static HOSTNAME For Your Pi On The Internet(dyndns)

Once again, if your ISP already gives you a static IP address, you don’t need to worry about this section.

We’ve already set up a static internal IP address for the Raspberry Pi, which means computers inside your local network will always know where to find your Pi. But what about projects that require Raspberry Pi to be connected to the Internet? If you want to build a Web server with your Raspberry Pi, people outside your network need to know where your Pi lives, which means setting a public IP that always looks the same.

I say “looks the same” because we’re really setting up a pseudo-static IP. Your ISP will continue to change the address as usual. So every time somebody connects to your Pi, the script we’re about to write will say, “Looks like the Pi has moved! Let me redirect you to the new address.”

We do this with a Dynamic DNS (DDNS), which maintains a name server that gets updated in real-time, and DDClient, a program that will correspond with DDNS directly from your Pi.

First sign up for a free dynamic host service like DNS Dynamic. Follow the instructions and create a new nameserver like Yourserver.dnsdynamic.com.

Now go to the command line on your Raspberry Pi and install DDClient with the following line:

sudo apt-get install ddclient

We need to edit the DDClient configuration with our DDNS’s new name server:

sudo nano /etc/ddclient/ddclient.conf

Every service will have slightly different configuration, but the DDNS website should tell you what you need to do to configure this file. A standard configuration for DNS Dynamic, for example, goes like this. Copy and paste it in.

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Chmod permissions (flags) explained: 600, 0600, 700, 777, 100 etc..

Want to know what the numbers in chmod mean? Using flags is an easy and short form to set user permissions. This article(I hope) puts it SIMPLE, if you want to learn the theory, also visit the links in the end.

There are four OCTAL (0..7) digits, which control the file permissions. But often, only three are used. If you use 600 it equals 0600. The missing digit is appended at the beginning of the number.

Each of three digits described permissions. Position in the number defines to which group permissions do apply!

Permissions:
1 – can execute
2 – can write
4 – can read

The octal number is the sum of those free permissions, i.e.
3 (1+2) – can execute and write
6 (2+4) – can write and read

Position of the digit in value:
1 – what owner can
2 – what users in the file group(class) can
3 – what users not in the file group(class) can

Examples:
chmod 600 file – owner can read and write
chmod 700 file – owner can read, write and execute
chmod 666 file – all can read and write
chmod 777 file – all can read, write and execute

Links:
1) Wikipedia explains that in greater detail: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystem_permissions
2) Main page for chmod: http://linux.die.net/man/1/chmod

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