Server 20.04 - sane is not responding

[David Fletcher]

Hi all,

I recently upgraded my home server from the 32 bit board that's been
running for the last 10 years to a 64 bit industrial mini ITX board.

Until then I was running 14.04 with which everything was working
perfectly including networked scanning. Uptime when I switched it off
was 332 days. All I needed to do was put the local network address into
saned.conf and it "Just Worked".

Now, sane just won't work. I start xsane on the desktop computer, it
puts up the message box that it's searching for scanners for a few
seconds then gives up and says it can't find any.

Now, I've seen a lot of vitriol spoken about systemd but this is the
first time I've met it. Apparently it is the source of my sane problem
but I have no idea how to fix it. Google searching produced some hits
from a couple of years ago so it was a problem then and for me is a
problem now.

Can I please get a little advice, preferably simple, to get sane
listening to my network again?

My google searching produced a couple of diagnostic commands such as
administrator at ServerIV:~$ service --status-all
 [ - ]  apache-htcacheclean
 [ + ]  apache2
 [ + ]  apcupsd
 [ + ]  apparmor
 [ + ]  apport
 [ + ]  atd
 [ + ]  avahi-daemon
 [ + ]  boinc-client
 [ - ]  console-setup.sh
 [ + ]  cron
 [ - ]  cryptdisks
 [ - ]  cryptdisks-early
 [ + ]  cups
 [ + ]  cups-browsed
 [ + ]  dbus
 [ + ]  dovecot
 [ + ]  grub-common
 [ - ]  hwclock.sh
 [ + ]  irqbalance
 [ - ]  iscsid
 [ - ]  keyboard-setup.sh
 [ + ]  kmod
 [ - ]  lvm2
 [ - ]  lvm2-lvmpolld
 [ + ]  multipath-tools
 [ - ]  open-iscsi
 [ - ]  open-vm-tools
 [ - ]  plymouth
 [ - ]  plymouth-log
 [ + ]  postfix
 [ + ]  procps
 [ - ]  rsync
 [ + ]  rsyslog
 [ - ]  saned
 [ - ]  screen-cleanup
 [ + ]  ssh
 [ + ]  udev
 [ + ]  ufw
 [ + ]  unattended-upgrades
 [ - ]  ups-monitor
 [ - ]  uuidd
 [ - ]  x11-common

I guess that the [ + ] means that the service is working, the [ - ]
means that it isn't, so I guess my question is, how do I change the [ -
] next to saned into a [ + ]?

It's probably nothing to do with the problem, but I can't help noticing
that everything I manually installed myself with aptitude such as the
mail server stuff, apache, APC UPS, cups, is all working but I'm pretty
sure I didn't install sane myself. If I were to purge sane then
reinstall it manually, any chance it would then work? Just a thought...

Thanks for reading and for any help received.

Dave