[Freeswitch-users] Spandsp mulated modems inbound/no /dev/FS* device?

[Anthony Minessale]

On Thu, May 17, 2012 at 2:38 PM, Alex Crow <acrow at integrafin.co.uk> wrote:
> On 17/05/12 14:51, Anita Hall wrote:
>> Hi Alex
>>
>> Did you get the answer to your first question ? Did you succeed in
>> using the emulated modem option for taking fax calls to hylafax ?
>>
>> I put the following in spandsp.conf.xml and got /dev/FS[0-4] devices
>> as soft links to /dev/pts/[4-8]. My freeswitch is running as root user
>> so I did not face the issue you did.
>>
>> <modem-settings>
>> <param name="total-modems"    value="5"/>
>> </modem-settings>
>>
>> What next? Could you point me to some doc in hylafax?
>>
>> (And before Steve lashes out at me again, I must clarify, I do not
>> want to just play around, but my boss is clueless and wants me to
>> evaluate hylafax :()
>>
>> regards,
>> Anita
>>

I need to stamp out some FUD

1) It works going both ways.  Its been complete for some time and in use.
2) I can't find anything but helpful comments from Steve.







>>
>
> Anita,
>
> The answer I got was that inbound is not yet supported by that
> mechanism, so I'd advise trying the Hylafax/T38Modem option if you need
> to use Hylafax. The T38Modem site provides tarballs of the OPAL and
> required dependencies to build it. The one main advantage we see for it
> is that there are quite a few free and commercial clients for Hylafax
> that can behave as a printer in Windows, so the user selects to print
> say a .doc file, chooses the fax printer, enters a number and off it
> goes. We used WHFC with XP, works great. We even have chaps batch faxing
> 100+ faxes a day using it from Excel with a macro.
>
> The other route for inbound is well documented, it using the inbuilt
> FreeSWITCH faxing and sending to email. Outbound is equally simple but
> not IMHO as easy for our end users as Hylafax (email-to-fax is simple
> but printing to fax from Windows not so simple). But with some work on
> your side, the spandsp stuff could probably do anything HF can do.
>
> As I said, Hylafax is excellent software and has been deployed on major
> production sites for probably 15 years+ with billions of total faxes
> delivered. We've used it for more than ten years with about 400 faxes
> in/out per day (which is piddling compared with some other sites, 10,000
> per day is not difficult). If you want to avoid using t38modem you'd
> probably have to set up a dedicated HF box with an ISDN/POTS
> multichannel card (and if you want to fax from/to FS use a BRI or T1/E1
> card to send audio to and from it). There are other ways of integrating
> it with backoffice systems including FTP, email, etc.
>
> To try to deploy a business fax system without first evaluating HylaFAX
> is in my opinion insane, so maybe your boss has a point. If, however,
> your boss is the one driving you to ask all these very diverse questions
> on this list (and they are indeed frequent and often completely
> unrelated to each other), perhaps you should ask him/her to focus on
> those that are his top priorities, and pick the first 3 to 5 and focus
> on those first, or in fact just compose a list of required features,
> post them up in a single email rather than 50, and ask "is this possible?".
>
> Just being a bit more targeted with your questions and how they link
> together might elicit more responses. Try to pick one solution at a
> time, test it, ask questions on that and stick with it for a bit and I
> think you'll get more help.
>
> Cheers
>
> Alex
>
>
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-- 
Anthony Minessale II

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