Re: [hylafax-users] General Questions about Hylafax

["Jay R. Ashworth" <jra@baylink.com>]

On Monday, August 21, 2000, at 8:35:43 PM, issue test wrote:
> Lee, thank you for your quick response!

Lee's response was so quick that you got it, but we didn't.  ;-)

> Please bear with my beginner questions.

No problem at all.  The more basic your questions are, the more we
know what we have to do to polish the answers.

> If configurations are made for email-to-fax submission, does that mean I 
> don't need a client program any more? But how does the email server know to 
> send the fax mail to the fax server? How difficult is it to make such a 
> configuration?

*Something* needs to be the client.  It doesn't have to be a
currently-written client; you can do the protocol stuff in your own
code, either natively or (much more easily, I think) with a library.

In an email gateway situation, the gateing code would call a client
program to do the submission.  This can be messy, as it makes it
harder to get status information back to your program.

> Say if in my Java code, I can have the fax number and fax file information, 
> does it make more sense to write some Java code to call the server program 
> hfaxd (as Lee mentioned) directly, or is there a way to make use of WHFC or 
> RelayFax? Which requires more effort? which makes more sense?

There's a Java library for this sort of thing; I think Joe Phillips
wrote it. If his library provides enough functionality to make it
practical to embed in your app, and there are no licensing problems,
by all means, I'd say do it that way. You could script out to an
already written client, but, except in a native Unix environment, it's
probably more trouble than it's worth.

Your java app: client side?  server side?  can you give us a *very
basic* spin on what you're doing?

> What effort level is it to make the Hylafax server basic functions work?

To set up a server, you mean?  Starting from scratch, with all the
recommended piece, and assembling a box specifically to do the job...
maybe 2 hours... if you know *anything* at all about Unix.  If not,
maybe a little longer.

> What's the ballpark figure of hours required for a system admin. level 
> person or some non system admin. person but who are proficient with 
> installing Linux, Perl, PHP things like that.

Yeah; ok.  About 2 hours; given all the right piece.  The HOWTO on
that installation is actually in the process of being written -- there
are some dependencies that you can avoid problems with if you start
from scratch... but they're still floating around a bit; locking them
down is one of the items on the 4.1 release to-do list.

> Also, where can I find the documentation about how to communicate with 
> hfaxd?

Hoo boy.  :-)  It's *roughly* FTP, as Lee says... but if you don't
read C++ code fluently, find someone who's written their own client,
and talk to them.  There's supposed to be an RFC-style document on the
C/S protocol... but it hasn't been written yet.  And, in theory, you
can just watch a trace... but that hasn't been enough for me.  At
least not yet.

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra@baylink.com
Member of the Technical Staff     
The Suncoast Freenet
Tampa Bay, Florida     http://baylink.pitas.com                +1 727 804 5015




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