Re: flexfax: faxgetty as a callback server.

[Matthias.Apitz@SOFTCON.de]

Nico Garcia wrote:
    
    On Fri, 31 Oct 1997, Lorenzo M. Catucci wrote:
    
    > Now, mgetty have two nice features, which are autoppp, and callback.
    > autoppp means I don't have to set up a ppp account, with a common
    > password, but rather have mgetty recognize ppp traffic, start pppd with
    > the login and pap options, and all is done with the standard username and
    > password. Callback means... you know that. Now, I have managed to have
    
    Hmmm. Under SunOS, I set up distinct PPP accounts for my users. This
    permits me to log, via utmp, when they call in as themselves and when
    they call in as PPP users.
    
    There are a gazillion ways to do this, of course....

Yes, but the question was not to *login* into the system.
What Lorenzo wants (and what I'ld call a good new feature
for HylaFAX's faxgetty(1M)) is that faxgetty(1M) accepts
a call, checks if it is a data call and checks also if
PPP-packets are coming in from the caller and (if so) directly
launches a PPP-daemon rather than the normal system getty or
ttymon. The problem with that is that faxgetty(1M) has to
read a few chars from the modem to check if they are PPP-data
and if not has to hand-over these characters to the normal
system's getty (e.g. push them back to modem fd to let
getty read them which isn't possible without integrating
the getty into faxgetty(1M)). With PPP the authentication
could be done directly using PAP or CHAP.

On my system at home I've one faxgetty(1M) running which launches
directly the PPP-daemon (instead of ttymon). I simply
patched the name "/usr/lib/saf/ttymon" to "/usr/local/ppp/pppd"
in a copy of sbin/faxgetty. The "modem" on this line is a
ZyXEL 2864I ISDN-TA and the Cisco 2503 in my company uses
CHAP to dial-in via PPP into my system at home. This line
can't be used for "normal" logins of course.

	matthias
    
    > mgetty called from faxgetty, but doing that I lost the callback option.
    > What I think is needed is a small external program which asks faxgetty (or
    > faxq, I still haven't understood which program does handle the calling)
    > via the FIFO and asks it to call a telephone number, and then pass the
    > serial line to another program, which, should be (I know, you are
    > surprised) mgetty. Is it feasible? How many people could like such a
    > feature?
    
    What you want, I think, is to have a shell script as your dialup login
    shell: this shell would then run off and start up the callback feature.
    
    How do you want to set up what phone number to call back? Typed by user,
    or what?
    
    			Nico Garcia
    			Engineer, CIRL 
    			Mass. Eye and Ear Infirmary
    			raoul@cirl.meei.harvard.edu