Thanks for the reply. I was able to get my scanner to work by following a different route.
1. Uninstalled and re-installed sane and sane-utils (not sure this step was necessary) 2. Downloaded and installed the drivers from the official Brother website (in order to use their brsaneconfig4 util) 3. Used brsaneconfig4 to configure the network scanner: sudo brsaneconfig4 -a name=BrotherScanner model=MFC-L8850CDW ip=<address> Just listing the steps in case someone else has the same problem. sane.service still shows inactive (dead), but apparently, as it was mentioned earlier, it gets activated on demand. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Desktop Packages, which is subscribed to sane-backends in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1577137 Title: saned.service masked and cannot be unmasked Status in sane-backends package in Ubuntu: Invalid Bug description: After upgrading to 16.04 (from 14.04) I noticed the sane daemon (sane- utils 1.0.25+git20150528-1ubuntu2) was no longer running. Attempting to manually start it results in systems complaining that the service is masked: kjetil at lucien in ~> sudo systemctl start saned Failed to start saned.service: Unit saned.service is masked. Unmasking it does not work: kjetil at lucien in ~> sudo systemctl unmask saned kjetil at lucien in ~> sudo systemctl start saned Failed to start saned.service: Unit saned.service is masked. kjetil at lucien in ~> ps u -C saned USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND kjetil at lucien in ~> ProblemType: Bug DistroRelease: Ubuntu 16.04 Package: sane-utils 1.0.25+git20150528-1ubuntu2 ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.4.0-21.37-generic 4.4.6 Uname: Linux 4.4.0-21-generic x86_64 ApportVersion: 2.20.1-0ubuntu2 Architecture: amd64 Date: Sun May 1 13:10:31 2016 InstallationDate: Installed on 2012-08-01 (1368 days ago) InstallationMedia: Ubuntu-Server 12.04 LTS "Precise Pangolin" - Release amd64 (20120424.1) SourcePackage: sane-backends UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to xenial on 2016-04-24 (6 days ago) mtime.conffile..etc.default.saned: 2016-05-01T12:51:02.879807 mtime.conffile..etc.sane.d.saned.conf: 2016-01-10T13:57:20.785810 To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/sane-backends/+bug/1577137/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages Post to : desktop-packages@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
