[clue-tech] HylaFAX + mgetty + WHFC

[Matt Durell]

I have had a few days off of work and I managed to get a few things done on
the Linux server (at home) that I have been wanting to do.  I will explain
what I have done and ask advice for a problem I am having.

I setup (about 3 years ago) mgetty+sendfax with my USR Sportster 56k.  It
works great.  I have it printing a fax when one arrives.  I had tried to get
it to email a fax as an attachment (it comes with a module that converts
each page to postscript) but did not have a windows viewer that was good
enough (I tried Ghost View and found it too slow).

If anyone is using mgetty to receive faxes, let me know if you want this
module.  It attaches to the new_fax feature of the fax side of mgetty and is
configured through the faxlist file.  I also have a module that takes all of
the fax pages and tars them into an archive directory.

Mgetty can figure out (with a decent modem) the difference between a data
call and a fax call.  If it is a data call it can be configured to check to
see if the connection is a PPP or FidoNET (remember that?) before it
displays a login prompt.  Very slick.

Yesterday I managed to modify that module to convert an incoming fax into
PDF format.  It's not perfect (the image scaling is off--everything through
PDF is about 75% of what it is supposed to be) but it works pretty well!

Now, I could receive faxes but I never found a decent way to send them
(excepting a large, bulky fax machine from the 70s--I'm to cheap to buy
one).

After looking around I could find no decent solution using the sendfax
portion of mgetty+sendfax.  I opted for another approach.

There is a product (GPL too!) called HylaFAX.  HylaFAX knows how to talk to
your fax modem and send faxes (much like sendfax).  Moreover, it has a
daemon that listens on a TCP port and acts as a server.  In other words, a
client can connect to the fax server, send it a document, tell it where to
send it (phone number) and the server will do just that!  There are many
clients for UNIX and a few for Macs.  There are a few for Windows.

HylaFAX also has the ability to receive incoming faxes as well.  The
integration is quite nice with the rest of the package.  I decided to keep
mgetty because the faxgetty included with HylaFAX does not handle data
connections of any type.  I need this feature quite a bit to gain access to
my LAN while I am on the road.

One of the Windows clients is called WHFC (Windows HylaFAX Client) and runs
on 9x/NT/2000. It comes with a printer device driver and accepts postscript
data.  All one needs to do is simply install a printer using the HP LJ 4/4M
Postscript driver and instead of pointing to LPT1:, you point to the WHFC
device!  To send a fax you simply print to that printer and it prompts you
for the fax information.  It also has the ability to keep a phone book or
access one through ODBC.

I installed this on my W2K box and it worked like a champ.  However, my
wife's 98 box wasn't so lucky.  It started to work find but now, right after
it connects to the server, it just hangs.  I am using the latest stable
version of everything.  I have even tried to upgrade her client to a beta
version with no luck.

Anyone seen this behavior?  It was reported many years ago and it was an
issue with DLL files.  Since then the distribution has been statically
linked to avoid these types of problems.  The only other reported issue
revolves around incorrect network routes.  In this case, there is only one
and it is configured correctly.


-- Matt Durell

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