scanservjs VS Portainer

My solution to use my workforce with paperless is scanservjs and scantopl and I'm pretty happy with it

I use scanservjs and scantopl on docker.

Recently I stumbled upon ScanServerJs, an awesome software that allows you to setup your own scan server.

Nothing to do with VueScan, but I just went through a journey trying to find a good solution for an old HP laserjet/scanner combo that I picked up used for $40. Although it's not wifi enabled, and has no Mac support (that I need for a couple of laptops in my household), I got it running perfectly on a Raspberry Pi, despite some difficulties with the HP driver "ecosystem". (Why do they make it so complicated..)

Once I got it working, I set up `saned` and was able to scan from my Ubuntu laptop over wifi just fine using `gscan2pdf`, which has a horrible user interface but at least gets the job done. Honestly it was a bit surprising to me to discover how terrible the scanning landscape still is in open source software, but I guess it's just not one of those things that is needed that often so some basic projects that were thrown together a decade ago still kind of work and that's that. I can accept that.

However, I absolutely could not manage to get any kind of "bridge" working for the Mac laptop, which apparently uses a different scanner API called TWAIN, and no amount of messing around with TWAIN/sane bridges worked out. Not to mention that one of the two Macs was a "work" laptop for which it was not allowed to install drivers or system software.

The whole time I was thinking, man, all I want is some web interface where I can log into the RPi and drive the scanner, and download the result, why is that so difficult. Lo and behold I came across this amazing project that solved the whole problem for me: https://github.com/sbs20/scanservjs. I'm not affiliated with it, but I was just so impressed at how well it worked that I feel the need to mention it, and give kudos to the author.

It was even easy to get running, just a single docker command on the RPi and it was up and running. The laptops can connect easily, of course, because it's just a local web server, and you can do multipage scans to PDF, which is really all I wanted. Fantastic bit of OSS, highly recommended if anyone finds themselves in a similar situation. Forget remote protocols and installing drivers, etc., just run this on the Pi and you're in business.

We currently have an HP M1136 MFP connected to CUPS on the local network. It always turns itself off and is never available. People have mostly resorted to walking over with their laptop and connecting via USB. Also there are no good network interfaces to the scanner. We use https://github.com/sbs20/scanservjs to control the scanner but it's too buggy and slow.

I've had an old all-in-one HP USB printer/scanner hooked up to a Raspberry Pi for a few years running CUPS. Network printing has been great via this method. But the scanner portion has sat unused ever since. Until, now.... WHY DID NOBODY TELL ME ABOUT SCANSERVER-JS?! My word this is incredible! It does for scanning what CUPS does for printing, and with a beautiful Web UI.

Portainer

> Any tips on the minimum hardware or VPS's needed to get a small swarm cluster setup?

From my testing, Docker Swarm is very lightweight, uses less memory than both Hashicorp Nomad and lightweight Kubernetes distros (like K3s). Most of the resource requirements will depend on what containers you actually want to run on the nodes.

You might build a cluster from a bunch of Raspberry Pis, some old OptiPlex boxes or laptops, or whatever you have laying around and it's mostly going to be okay. On a practical level, anything with 1-2 CPU cores and 4 GB of RAM will be okay for running any actually useful software, like a web server/reverse proxy, some databases (PostgreSQL/MySQL/MariaDB), as well as either something for a back end or some pre-packaged software, like Nextcloud.

So, even 5$/month VPSes are more than suitable, even from some of the more cheap hosts like Hetzner or Contabo (though the latter has a bad rep for limited/no support).

That said, you might also want to look at something like Portainer for a nice web based UI, for administering the cluster more easily, it really helps with discoverability and also gives you redeploy web hooks, to make CI easier: https://www.portainer.io/ (works for both Docker Swarm as well as Kubernetes, except the Kubernetes ingress control was a little bit clunky with Traefik instead of Nginx)

In this section, we will add Portainer to help us in managing our Docker containers. You can find more details about it here. To integrate Portainer into our EC2 project, we can follow these steps:

Git issues pointing to: https://docs.portainer.io/v/ce-2.9/start/install/agent/swarm/linux gives a ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS.

I am currently running Portainer, but webhooks (GitOps) appear to be broken ( [2.19.0] GitOps Updates not automatically polling from git · Issue #10309 · portainer/portainer · GitHub ) and so I cannot send webhook to redeploy a stack. So, looking for alternatives. Using this as a good excuse to learn more about docker and CI/CD etc.

A Synology NAS running Portainer (https://www.portainer.io/) running Paperless NGX (https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx)

This works better than I can possibly tell you.

I have an Epson WorkForce ES-580W that I bought when my mother passed away to bulk scan documents and it scans everything, double-sided if required, multi-page PDFs if required, at very high speed and uploads everything to OneDrive, at which point I drag and drop everything into Paperless.

I could, thinking about it, have the scanner email stuff to Paperless. Might investigate that today.

Paperless will OCR it and make it all searchable. This setup is amazing, I love living in the future.

> I've come to the conclusion (after trying kops, kubespray, kubeadm, kubeone, GKE, EKS) that if you're looking for < 100 node cluster, docker swarm should suffice. Easier to setup, maintain and upgrade.

Personally, I'd also consider throwing Portainer in there, which gives you both a nice way to interact with the cluster, as well as things like webhooks: https://www.portainer.io/

With something like Apache, Nginx, Caddy or something else acting as your "ingress" (taking care of TLS, reverse proxy, headers, rate limits, sometimes mTLS etc.) it's a surprisingly simple setup, at least for simple architectures.

casaos it just makes things like backups, offsite syncing and many other nas related things so much easier to manage. And gives you a proper nas like experience similar to that in which you'd fine on companies like tnas or synology. I actually also use it as a replacement for portainer when i don't need the more advanced features it offers

> I moved to docker swarm and love it. It's so much easier, straight forward, automatic ingress network and failover were all working out of the box. I'll stay with swarm for now.

I've had decent luck in the past with the K3s distribution, which is a bit cut down Kubernetes: https://k3s.io/

It also integrates nicely with Portainer (aside from occasional Traefik ingress weirdness sometimes), which I already use for Swarm and would suggest to anyone that wants a nice web based UI: https://www.portainer.io/

Others might also mention K0s, MicroK8s or others - there's lots of options there. But even so, I still run Docker Swarm for most of my private stuff as well and it's a breeze.

For my needs, it has just the right amount of abstractions: stacks with services that use networks and can have some storage in the form of volumes or bind mounts. Configuration in the form of environment variables and/or mounted files (or secrets), some deployment constraints and dependencies sometimes, some health checks and restart policies, as well as resource limits.

If I need a mail server, then I just have a container that binds to the ports (even low port numbers) that I need and configure it. If I need a web server, then I can just run Apache/Nginx/Caddy and use more or less 1:1 configuration files that I'd use when setting up either outside of containers, but with the added benefit of being able to refer to other apps by their service names (or aliases, if they have underscores in the names, which sometimes isn't liked).

At a certain scale, it's dead simple to use - no need for PVs and PVCs, no need for Ingress and Service abstractions, or lots and lots of templating that Helm charts would have (although those are nice in other ways).