Re: flexfax: sharing a modem with pppd

[Matthias.Apitz@SOFTCON.de]

Nico Garcia wrote:
    
    On Tue, 4 Nov 1997, Luiz Otavio L. Zorzella wrote:
    
    > Hi,
    > 
    > I'd like to know if it's possible in hylafax to send a fax through the
    > modem being used by pppd.
    > 
    > I mean: if I can turn of pppd, send a fax, and turn pppd on again.
    > 
    > I tryied doing this, but seems that the hylafax server insists on
    > resolving my machine's name when it gets a requisition, so that, when
    > I try to use "sendfax" when pppd is off, I'll get a message:
    > 
    > 
    > Service not available, remote server closed connection
    
    Hmm. Sounds like PPP and HylaFAX are not (directly) the problem, but
    rather your domain name resolution when you don't have PPP running. Do
    you have a default fax server set up with FAXSERVER somewhere? Try
    killing the PPP, and seeing if you can run "faxstat -v".
    
    If that doesn't work, try setting your FAXSERVER to "localhost" and see
    what you get....
    
    			Nico Garcia
    			Engineer, CIRL 
    			Mass. Eye and Ear Infirmary
    			raoul@cirl.meei.harvard.edu

The FAXSERVER environment variable controls which host and port
the clients (e.g. faxstat(1) or sendfax(1)) should contact
for the "hylafax" service of hfaxd(1M). This variable has
nothing to do with the running hfaxd(1M) and if I understand
the problem report of Luiz Otavio right the problem is that
a client *can* reach the service at the host, the hfaxd(1M)
gets the connection, forks and aborts with SIG 11 in
case the PPP-link isn't up. This sounds like related to a name
resolving problem but is unrelated to FAXSERVER setting.

At the moment I don't know which OS type Luiz Otavio is
running.... ah, it's Linux (just checked my HylaFAX mail
folders). Luiz Otavio, please run a strace(1) command
with the -f flag (to monitor also forked childs) against
the running hfaxd(1M), start this before you fire up the
client (or just use "telnet localhost hylafax") and
send me the output of the strace(1). I'll also send
you a patch (directly) which deals with this problem in pl2
(but without the strace I'm not sure if you hit the same
situation).

I also managed to compile HylaFAX at home on the S.u.S.E. Linux
box of my son (normaly I run SVR4.2) and can now answer
Linux related questions better than before.

	matthias