Re: [hylafax-users] newbie questions

[Lee Howard <faxguy@deanox.com>]

At 09:46 AM 5/8/01 -0500, Albert Everett wrote:
>I've known about HylaFAX for years but am just now considering using 
>it, since we've had another fax server in place.
>
>We have a prospective client that would like to have a feature on his 
>web site, where a visitor visits a product page and is able to enter 
>her fax number, hit the submit button, and have a program 
>automatically fax the correct product info to her.
>
> From reading the documentation, it sounds like it should be easy to 
>write a cgi that takes form input and does a system call to fire up 
>sendfax to send the document to the visitor. I was surprised that 
>this sort of application wasn't mentioned explicitly in the mail 
>archives.

Apparently it's too easy to ask questions about - or rather, those who
would write the CGI to do that wouldn't ask questions about writing the
CGI, but rather about HylaFAX.

>Is there some reason that this sort of application should be a problem?

Nope, but you may want to consider the security implications of such an
application.  Unless you are authenticating the user on your system
somehow, a malicious person or script could access the page and send out
oodles of long-distance faxes, racking your customer up a large bill and
perhaps angering a lot of recipients who didn't want the fax and perhaps
violating various state laws that require any received fax to be
requested... or easily cause a fax-DoS by preventing useful faxes from
being delivered in a timely fashion.

I've done this via PHP before, and it was swell.  Only, I authenticated the
users with apache and MySQL and then passed that user info on to HylaFAX
for auditing purposes.

>Another question - is there a way to pre-save documents to be sent in 
>native fax format so that ps2fax or whatever doesn't have to do a 
>conversion every time someone requests a document? The set of product 
>documents is small, but I expect request load to be high.

Yes, run ps2fax on the document and save the output, which I believe is
TIFF F.  HylaFAX won't need to convert this TIFF F image any further if you
do it right.

Lee.



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