Re: flexfax: How best use multiple modems?

[Leslie Mikesell <les@Mcs.Net>]

> 
> Thanks for the clarification, but could you illuminate us and tell us 
> what this program is that can allow you to map the pty to the 
> socket?

Poke around the ftp areas of the vendor of your terminal server.  There
is one at ftp://ftp.livingston.com/pub/livingston/contrib/netty.c
but it may be portmaster-specific in the way it treats the modems
as a pool.  I think cisco used to have a similar program called tcpconn
but they have rearranged things and I don't see it now.  Anyway,
handling ptys is somewhat os-specific and the socket side is fairly
simple.  If anyone needs this I think they'd be better off modifying
Hylafax to bypass the pty and talk directly to a socket thus avoiding
the extra latency of a program in the middle.

I've always thought it would be nice if Hylafax also provided the
reverse service as well, emulating the portmaster function where
you connect to a tcp port and get an available modem from the
pool.  Faxq already knows the states of all the modems so it
could pick one easily and launch a program that simply copies
between socket/device.  Then you could use the shareware comt
program to let Windows machines on the net share the same modems
used by Hylafax.

  Les Mikesell
    les@mcs.com