fax and asterisk

[geoffrey mendelson]

I've been playing more with asterisk and fax and wanted to post this  
to document what I found and see if anyone else had a better answer.

I'm running Asterisk 1.6.2 under UBUNTU 9.10 using the UBUNTU  
packages. I found that the latest for 9.04 was Asterisk 1.4, and had  
to upgrade my second computer, which was a small disaster on its own.

I obtained single user free licenses for each system for Free Fax for  
Asterisk (FFA). I then installed them on each machine and found that  
they caused Asterisk to crash with no information. I tracked that down  
to having app_fax autoloaded and I had to mark it as not to be loaded  
in modules.conf.

The documentation for FFA is pretty sparse or there are a bunch of  
things missing. The documentation that comes with it shows you how to  
receive a fax and send one, but there is no simple way to receive a  
fax and autoincrement the file name, or pass asterisk a file name to  
send.

Since one of my systems has a functioning Hylafax system on it, I  
decided to do "plan b". Plan B is to install IAXMODEM and set it up as  
a Hylafax modem.

The best instruction page I could find was in Italian, but since I  
could read the config files and path names, I figured it out. Hylafax  
works well with IAXModem. Hint, make sure to turn off sending of faxes  
via the IAX modem by default until it works. :-)

I could not get an IAX connection to detect a fax tone, but that may  
have been a configuration problem. Supposedly in 1.6 support for that  
was added.

In any case, in order for a FAX to work over VoIP, you need to use the  
uLaw or aLaw codecs (IAXMODEM supports uLaw), so it begs the question  
if there is a source of incoming Israeli DID's (and outgoing service)  
that supports it?

Looks like for I'll still be keeping my BEZEQ line for the fax machine  
and modem.

Geoff.
-- 
geoffrey mendelson N3OWJ/4X1GM
Jerusalem Israel geoffreymendelson at gmail.com
New word I coined 12/13/09, "Sub-Wikipedia" adj, describing knowledge  
or understanding, as in he has a sub-wikipedia understanding of the  
situation. i.e possessing less facts or information than can be found  
in the Wikipedia.