Few months back I bought myself a new all in one HP photo printer since my old printer & scanner got fried by a power surge! The original idea was to share the whole device via the USB port on my Raidsonic IB-NAS4220B NAS box but had to abbandon the idea due to various issues which are of no value to this article. My second option was to share the device via my Windows 2003 server, the printer worked fine but when I came to install the scanner, the HP setup showed me a message saying that the OS is not supported and quit!
After a lot of googling I discovered that Hp scanners are compatible with windows 2003 using the native WIA service in windows, which by default is disabled in Windows 2003.
Turn on the WIA feature, by following the following the steps.
- Click Start, Settings, Control Panel
- Double-click Administrative tools
- Click Services
- Double-click Windows Image Acquisition from the list
- Under Startup Type, Select "Automatic"
- Under Service Status, Click Start.
- Restart the computer and connect the scanner
In my case the scanner was installed automatically but you might need to install the drivers from the product CD.
That is part one done! The second bit is sharing the scanner. Unfortunately there is no native support in Windows to share TWAIN devices so I managed to achieve this via a third party app, BlindScanner Pro (Costs $30 per user).
Setting it up is really simple:
- Install BlindScanner Server on your Windows 2003 Machine, this should run as a service.
- Make sure you have port 8900 open
- Install BlindScanner Pro client (Scanit To) onto the user's PC and make sure port 8900 is not blocked by any firewalls.
- Launch the ScanitTo Application, you will be prompted to select the source scanner, select BlindScanner Pro
- Click on next, the next screen will give you several options, the most important are the target directory at the bottom, any scans you make will be saved to this location and the File format, unless you need very high image detail, I suggest using JPEG.
- On the next step, a new window will pop up, on first run, you will need to set up the server name/ip. Click on the plus icon and type in the server address in the new window.
- Now you're ready to go! Press the scan button and you're supposed to be presented with the image in the scanner.
