TUTORIAL HylaFAX / AvantFax for PIAF! - Parts 1-4

[thunderheart]

Vista Weirdness

Hey Phin,

I actually did manage to get Winprint to install on Vista. I changed a security setting of some description which I can't remember very distinctly (it was like 2 AM ... go figure) and the weird dialogs went away.

I did not try to use it however. A little clarification is that I have two identical PIAF systems. One is used live in the offices of my company and the other is my "captive" system. I test things on the captive system prior to unleashing them in the "production" environment at the office. The only difference in the two systems is that one is a hybrid with 4 POTS lines via a Rhino R4FXO card and also a metered VOIP trunk provided by VOIPStreet. The captive has no POTS lines, just an IAX trunk.

The production system has been running with PIAF 1.2 for about a year now. It has a network attached, Brother MFC-7820N SCAN/FAX/PRINT box as an extension via a Grandstream HandyTone-286. We use this for outgoing faxes. A third-party, offsite fax-to-email gateway provides incoming fax. This works pretty well but there are two things I'd like to fix:

1) Better outgoing fax completions. We occasionally get problems on outgoing faxes which require multiple retries (which is annoying).
2) Elimination of the external fax-to-email gateway (which costs us money).

So I thought I'd try Hylafax/AvantFAX just for grins on the captive system exercising the install process a little before putting it on the production box. Unfortunately, the only client I had to test the Winprint part on was a new laptop that came with Vista Home.

Of course I didn't expect fax to work over the VOIP trunk I have on the captive, at least not with any regularity. The Winprint website says it works with Vista I think ...

Anyway, it really isn't a high priority ... just messin' around with it. I will have to say though that this is the first (albeit minor) disappointment I've had with Vista. Honestly I've been pleasantly surprised. I'm generally not too fond of Microsoft products, but really ... Vista doesn't seem all that bad.

Dallas

 

[phinphan]

Dallas - I was just researching something else and I came across a security policy to mimic windows xp. Was that the security policy you changed?

 

[thunderheart]

Uac

Well maybe I modified some secpol parameters indirectly. I went into the control panel and opened the user management tool. In there I disabled User Account Control on my Admin account. This allowed the install to complete but alas, when I actually tried to print to the HylaFAX server, similar behavior prevented the driver from actually working.

Dallas

BTW: Got any idea what causes this to print periodically in the cli ?

-- Remote UNIX connection
-- Remote UNIX connection disconnected

I saw these while monitoring for a call attempt during my test fax. Never noticed them before.

 

[mspieker]

OCR (fax optical character recognition)

I spelled ocr out because we all know the search doesn't work with 3 letter words =)

Tony/Joe thanks so much for your efforts this is truly an ASTOUNDING piece of work!!!

If someone already posted this, sorry for the double post. (I did multiple searches and found nothing)

Anyways, if you go here
http://www.avantfax.com/ocr-support.php

you can enable ocr search support of the fax content itself once an item is moved to the archives.

of course being that these are faxs, and fax quality is sometimes in the toilet, this will definately be a hit and miss feature =) but hey, it's free!!

Another piece of candy for the PBIAF candy store!!!

 

[raphou]

ttyIAX0 [Please wait]

Hello Everybody!

Thanks very much for this! It seems so great!

But unfortunately, I have a "please wait" for all my virtual fax lines.

What have I done wrong?

Thanks again!

 

[tshif]

Hello Everybody!

Thanks very much for this! It seems so great!

But unfortunately, I have a "please wait" for all my virtual fax lines.

What have I done wrong?

Thanks again!

How many virtual modems do you see in "please wait" status?

 

[raphou]

all 4 of them...
Strange isn't it?

 

[tshif]

In your mysql avantfax database, how many modems are in the modem table?

 

[raphou]

Hi there!

I see all four modems in the table...

Any other idea?

Thanks a lot!

 

[tshif]

Have a look in /dev for files named: ttyIAX0 - ttyIAX3.

Files should be present (exactly this many), in exact case, owned by root, set for 0777.

yes?

 

[raphou]

Indeed, I have all for of them. These are symbolic links to different paths in /dev/pts/ (1,2,3,..) all owned by root and 0777

(and I have 60 tty in that forlder too and four ttyS0-3)

 

[LiquidCaffeine]

Automatically send to email address

I promise I searched through the thread, but for the life of me cannot find the section on how to configure AvantFAX/HylaFAX to automatically send received faxes to an email address. I have email address configured for the users, and can manually send the faxes via the control panel for AvantFAX. What am I missing?

 

[vcallaway]

For Hylafax

In the file /var/spool/hylafax/etc/FaxDispatch

case "$DEVICE" in
ttyIAX0) [email protected]; FILETYPE=pdf;; # all faxes received on ttyIAX0
esac

 

[Reddog]

So how do you fax using ISDN2?

What do you put instead of:

[from-fax]
exten => _x.,1,Dial(ZAP/2/${EXTEN})
exten => _x.,n,Hangup()

If you want to use ISDN?

 

[jroper]

[from-fax]
exten => _x.,1,Dial(mISDN/g:isdn1/${EXTEN})
exten => _x.,n,Hangup()

 

[LiquidCaffeine]

For Hylafax

In the file /var/spool/hylafax/etc/FaxDispatch

case "$DEVICE" in
ttyIAX0) [email protected]; FILETYPE=pdf;; # all faxes received on ttyIAX0
esac

I've done that for all 4 IAXmodems, but still nothing sent to email. The contents of the FaxDisptach file is below (email is set to a valid one in real file):

case "$DEVICE" in
   ttyIAX0) [EMAIL="[email protected]"][email protected][/EMAIL]; FILETYPE=pdf;; # all faxes received on ttyIAX0
   ttyIAX1) [EMAIL="[email protected]"][email protected][/EMAIL]; FILETYPE=pdf;; # all faxes received on ttyIAX1
   ttyIAX2) [EMAIL="[email protected]"][email protected][/EMAIL]; FILETYPE=pdf;; # all faxes received on ttyIAX2
   ttyIAX3) [EMAIL="[email protected]"][email protected][/EMAIL]; FILETYPE=pdf;; # all faxes received on ttyIAX3
esac

 

[LiquidCaffeine]

Automatically have AvantFAX email received faxes - solved

Doh, can't believe I overlooked this step:

• For each IAXModem
  • Menu - > Configure -> Contact <- set this to the desired email address for each modem

I'm gonna go set in the corner now

 

[raphou]

Does somebody has the same problem as me?(all fax set as "please wait" ?)...

Thanks for you help..

 

[raphou]

Oh.... By the way, I try to send a fax again (pdf) and this time this error came:

[B]Send Fax[/B]

  [CENTER]Problem sending the fax.
sendfax: 460 Failed to submit job 4: Unspecified reason (scheduler NAK'd request).[/CENTER]

​

Thanks for all!

 

[bgriff]

change area code in ./piaf-hylafax.sh

I entered an area code instead of accepting the blank default when running ./piaf-hylafax.sh. Where can I correct my mistake before proceeding?

Thanks for a great install script. It worked great when I read the directions the first time through on my test box. After doing it once, I thought that I had the certificate and didn't need no stinkin' instructions. DUH.