Re: flexfax: samba en flexfax

[Mike Porter <mike@UDel.Edu>]

On Thu, 16 Apr 1998, Jonathan Chen wrote:

> On Wed, 15 Apr 1998, Thierry Coopman wrote:
> 
> > Is it possible to use HylaFAX as faxserver over the smb protocol??
> > 
> > There is some doc comming with samba wich explains it with the mgetty+sendfax package, and I was wondering if I could use that with HylaFAX too.
> 
> The main problem with using HylaFAX with samba is the extraction of
> the destination phone number. It's easy enough to set up a filter at
> your spooler so that faxed-documents are sent to HylaFAX; but then how
> does HylaFAX determine the phone number to use?
> 
> One possible solution that has been discussed here is to use a std
> template for *ALL* your faxes, and have a particular tag which a
> preliminary filter can extract the phone number from, and supply it to
> HylaFAX. That's the best you can do so far without writing a client
> from scratch..

One approach I had heard of (and am thinking of implementing when I
have time) is to write a program that runs on the PC.  It will
listen on a particular TCP port.  The user sends the FAX to a samba
defined printer.  In the samba config, it is possible to run a
program when a print is received for a particular printer.  This
program can determine the IP address of the print sender.  So, the
program running on the samba server can make a TCP connection back
to the server on the PC, start a 'phone book' application, and have
the user decide at that point who to send the FAX to.

I think this could work pretty well.  It's not a clean as doing a
Windows Printer driver, but doing a printer driver implies buying
some sort of kit from Microsoft, and I'm guessing that the
resultant code would not be modifyable by anyone unless they also
had purchased the kit.

Mike