fax and asterisk

[ik]

On Sat, Jan 30, 2010 at 21:04, geoffrey mendelson <
geoffreymendelson at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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?
>

As long as you are working either with FXO/PRI you can use what ever
supplier you wish to use (I do not recommend HOT, but other then that I do
not have any preferences for pro/con on suppliers).

VoIP have a lot of glitches with FAXes afaik, and I never saw even one VoIP
service that actually able to pass FAX properly.
You can also try spandsp and not only IAXmodem for FAXing, but 90% (or more)
of VoIP installation does not work well with FAXes.



>
> 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.
>

Ido
http://ik.homelinux.org/
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