Created attachment 155313 [details] Two identical network scanners DISCLAIMER I am aware that this is not a bug as such and probably also not in skanpage itself, but this problem strongly impacts usability of the application. The described user experience is essentially random and confusing for non-technically minded people. To make this more user-sided, I'll mix printing and scanning below. SUMMARY Having multiple scanner/printer units of the same model in the network makes it difficult to select the correct one. Skanpage shows a list of devices and their IPs (see picture). Selecting the correct one, currently requires manually checking the IP of the desired unit and looking it up in the list. This is confusing especially as the IP may change depending on DHCP settings. In my case, I have two DCP-L2530DW models connected to my network and both are configured with different "contact and location" information. When printing from Android using the provider from Brother, it displays the printers as: DCP-L2530DW series (ContactA) DCP-L2530DW series (ContactB) While not perfect (as showing the location instead of the contact would be a more logical choice), this allows to quickly detect the correct unit. STEPS TO REPRODUCE 1. Connect 2 scanners of the same model to the network 2. Open Skanpage 3. Wait for the network device detection OBSERVED RESULT Hard to distinguish units. IP is only hint. EXPECTED RESULT Display some additional information about the configuration of each unit. Maybe a reverse DNS lookup of the IP to get the hostname in the network.
Yeah, we should probably add location information here to help disambiguate. IP address is definitely not good enough.
I'm afraid we cannot do much on the Skanpage/KSaneCore side of things as SANE only provides us four strings (vendor, model, name, type) for the device description. We could try some very hackish stuff trying to extract the IP from the name property, but e.g. my scanner with escl backend does not even show an IP address (which make this issue described here even worse...).
Actually I have been playing around a little bit and it seems that the eSCL backend displays the mDNS name (I have the latest 1.2.1 SANE release installed). Can you confirm and does it solve the issue for you?
After more digging: my distro switched to using the separate sane-airscan package for network scanners instead of the escl backend that's included by default in SANE (the package with all the drivers for scanners). While the first uses the host name, the latter seems to display the IP address only