[hylafax-users] Hardware suggestions to get Hylafax running?

["Joshua Kinard" <jkinard@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

Looking to get a Hylafax server running for fax-to-email after giving up hunting down a cheap Faxpress unit, and I wanted to query people here on the kind of hardware I should look for that'll integrate with both our phone system and the server that'll be running Hylafax.

Our phone system at present is a Rolm CBX 9751 Model 10, with the input lines being Dual PRI's.  We have an Adtran Atlas 550 that converts the PRI to standard T1 signaling.  We also have an Adtran Total Access 616 channel bank (FXS ports only) taking care of some analog lines -- it's fed by a plain T1.

The server I'm thinking of running this setup on is an HP DL385, Opteron 270 and running SuSE Ent 10.1 w/ OES2 (from Novell).

To integrate things, my options are to either do it through our old Rolm system or go through the Adtran 616 channel bank, by bypasses our Rolm.  The phone company says at minimum, they'll have to swap the 616 out with a unit that has FXO ports if we want to do Tandem E&M signaling to pass DID/DNIS digits along.  If I want to go through our Rolm instead, I need to use an ISDN interface or a T1 card in the server, as the Rolm can't do DTMF signaling out of its standard analog cards.  I'm told we can probably cheat by using COTS cards and tampering with the groundstart voltage to "fake" a wink (I think this is what I was told), but that may or may not be possible from the software side.

To talk to Hylafax, I've been perusing a number of modem cards, trying to find a pretty cheap one with modern Linux support, and if it's a modem board, has at least 8 ports.  I've managed to grab a NetAccess MPM-8 board off eBay for $5, but it's proving to be difficult to find documentation on this particular board, so I don't know if this board will do what I need it to do.

I've also pondered a wacky setup of 2 4-port USB hubs, 8 USB->Serial cables, and 8 external modems wired together....figuring that may help if I encounter this "wedging" issue I saw listed (I can just power cycle the individual modem if need be), but that may be going a little too "mad scientist" to get things working.

So I guess, I was wondering if anyone here had suggestions on a good, but cheap, ~8 port modem card would be, or maybe even ISDN/T1 cards, and whether hylafax can communicate with any of them.  It seems Brooktrout's are the tricky ones currently, so I guess those are out (have to see with the MPM-8, though).


Thanks!,

Josh


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