[Freeswitch-users] Hylafax server emulation

[Steve Underwood]

Hi,

It has always been clear that a HylaFAX compatible FAX job submission 
server would add considerably to the value of the FAX facilities in 
Asterisk and Freeswitch, but somehow it hasn't happened until now. I 
recently found that in 2005 someone produced something fairly basic for 
Asterisk in Perl, but it doesn't seem to have been well publicised, and 
it looks like development stalled long ago.

I now have the skeleton of HylaFAX compatible FAX job submission server, 
in C, working. It accepts FAX submissions from sendfax and a couple of 
the windows HylaFAX clients, though it needs a lot more polishing. Now I 
need to look at the best thing to do on the Freeswitch side. I aim to 
make the server maintain its own database of FAX jobs. It will attach to 
Freeswitch, by ESL; push the jobs through FS; deal with scheduling, 
retries, etc; and report the final result to the user, just as HylaFAX 
does. The thing I am rather unsure about is the best way to handle the 
accounts used to accept FAX jobs? Should I maintain a separate database 
of FAX accounts, or hook into an existing database? I would welcome 
suggestions for what would be the most useful approach.

Steve