Hi all, I need to save scanned documents directly from the MFP scanner to a folder on SeaDrive.
How do I set this up?
What I did was to make a seafile account for the scanner, with just a library I called “scanner”, and shared it to the users who would need access to those files.
Then I made a small VM with a simple samba server config setup to allow the printer (and only the printer) access to a directory on that server. I synced that directory to the library with the seafile cli client.
https://help.seafile.com/syncing_client/linux-cli/
I mostly used a dedicated server just for this because the printers in our office were isolated on a separate network, so the scanner couldn’t talk to any other servers. Otherwise I probably would have just used an new share on existing samba server we already had.
FYI: we use n8n with the Imap and seafile node (community node available on github) for this. This is a more complex alternative but might be useful if you use n8n anyway or have further automation needs.
The scanner needs to be able to send emails to an address (in our case a local mail server and dedicated email user for that purpose only). N8N then checks for new mails via the IMAP node for that email account and uses the seafile node (with a specific seafile user that has limited access in our case) to upload when new mail is found.
We run everything locally via docker.
Multiple folders can be uploaded to via “plus-addressing” (e.g. printermail+folder@localmail.srv), and a code node in n8n extracts this “folder” to decide the correct upload location.
This makes it easy to have every user send documents from the printer to a seafile folder that is shared with them or a team. This can be further automated for auto-folder creation etc.
Works like a charm!
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