Re: flexfax: faxgetty as a callback server.

[Leslie Mikesell <les@Mcs.Net>]

> 
> 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.

There have been some postings to the list about success with letting
faxgetty start mgetty with auto_ppp enabled but it sounds tricky.
If you are using speed-buffering modems and the call is already
answered getty's role is reduced to collecting the first line
of input, changing the line state in utmp, and exec'ing login
with the input line given as an argument to login.  This sounds
to me like a couple of calls to functions that are already in
faxgetty (but things always sound easy if you aren't doing it
yourself...).

Is someone interested in building this functionality into faxgetty
along with the autoppp detection?  We'd save the trouble exec'ing
a 30K program to let mgetty do this tiny bit of work, and more
importantly we could simplify installation because you would no
longer need to build the gettydefs entry to match the faxgetty
modem setup or figure out you local getty's arguments.

  Les Mikesell
    les@mcs.com