Re: FAXing from SCO Unix 5.0.6

Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
Steve M. Fabac, Jr. wrote:
Jean-Pierre Radley wrote:
Steve M. Fabac, Jr. typed (on Sun, Apr 20, 2008 at 02:27:24PM -0500):

Why not just run it with HylaFAX on the SCO box itself, or another
UNIX or Linux box, and get full incoming and coutgoing fax and
dial-up modem services?
ActiveFax does full incoming and outgoing fax as well as fax on demand
and will work with T1 phone links to deliver faxes to specific inbox
based upon phone number destination of the incoming fax.

And your statement "That means buying and supporting another..." just
as easily can end as Linux or UNIX box. Again, who does not have all
the Windows boxes they need to press one into service as the ActiveFax
server?

The software's free: it does take some attention to set up correctly,
but for a simple setup it's pretty trivial.
Every time I've tried to set up HylaFAX it defeated me.

I've used it for both outgoing and incoming faxes on 5.0.6, 5.0.7, and
6.0.0. In what way did it defeat you?


JP,

I can't say as the last time I tried to install it on my system to see
how it works was so long ago.

I have a vague memory of it requiring more steps and additional utilities
to get it to work. I'm not sure even which version I tried to install
or where I got it from. There was some documentation but nothing that
was a step by step setup instruction. The documentation was typical of
programmers writing documentation: They know what they know, but they
don't know what to tell someone totally unfamiliar with their software
what to do to get the product installed and working.

I searched today on Hylafax in c.u.s.m and found Tony Lawrence's how to
on installing Hylafax on SCO. I read it and it reminded me of the
additional software that I did not have and was uninterested in installing
to support the product. I have no use for bash, or Ghostscript on UNIX.
There was no "mkdev fax" script to setup and enable Hylafax.

Ahh. But you have a 'mkdev VSIfax', integrated to handle the phone numbers to fax from SCO systems to a Windows fax server? I'm.... amazed. Where is this integrated utility?

Not necessary. In the last installation I was called by a client running
AIX 4.3 as their company's primary application box. The application is
a wholesale inventory control and sales system custom written in C.

The owner/manager wanted to fax reports to a near by fax machines wherever
he was in the world (travels a lot meeting new customers and suppliers).

He is using a VPN from his laptop back to the office to access the
application via telnet.

He did not want to be dependent upon the customer's LAN and printers and
have to suffer the setup (which he is incapable of doing) to integrate
his laptop on a customer's network to print to their printers.

I had previously performed work for the client in configuring SAMBA on his
AIX server after someone else installed it and was unable to get it to
run. To support remote printers over a VPN to a secondary warehouse
location, I installed Netcat by compiling a custom source provided by
Kevin Smith at Shade tree Software that he had modified as required to
compile on AIX.

I brought in a modem and installed the demo version of ActiveFax on the
programmers XP workstation and assisted the programmer in modeling the
code to modify his print routines to print to a netcat based "fax" printer
with the necessary embedded fields to specify the target phone number
where the report was to be faxed: "lp -dfax -s." After a couple days of
testing, they licensed ActiveFAX and ordered a Multitech MT5634ZBA external
modem.


I do sympathize with the difficulty you describe. HylaFAX was written primarily by Sam Leffler, one of the authors of BSD UNIX. As such, it's a powerful and well crafted tool, comfortable for programmers to install. Sam also was a core author of TIFF, the graphic format used for storing faxes by almost everyone. So he wrote robust, flexible tools to accomplish a wide variety of tasks well.

But he didn't put in the prerequisites for you, especially for an AT&T based UNIX such as SCO. You'd need to install tools like bash, because ksh is not nearly so broadly used for shell scripting. And ghostscript, for getting superior printer drivers and rendering PDF and Postscript and other formats well, is also quite useful. And TIFF, used in numerous graphical tools such as ImageMagick and GIMP.

I guess you can say that I lacked the dedication I needed to get the product
working and still feel that way toward it.

Fair enough. I suspect you're missing out on a lot of useful open source tools which certainly weren't incorporated into OpenServer.

I have not sworn off useful open source tools. I use what I need to
accomplish the client's goals. Prior to SCO providing gnupg in a maintenance
patch for 5.0.7, I downloaded and compiled Gnupg 1.4.1 for a client's
system to encrypt and decrypt account files transferred to the client
from their client using pgp. I've also downloaded and compiled Spamassassin
and installed it on several client's systems.

As for Hylafax and AIX: Since I was unsuccessful on SCO, I knew I didn't have
a chance of getting it to work on the AIX box. I'm not an AIX admin and
have to pour over the docs every time I touch AIX. Since I had previously
installed Netcat on the AIX box and had used ActiveFax from SCO,
proposing ActiveFax to the AIX client was a no-brainer. I knew I could
install ActiveFax and get it to work with the client's AIX application.

--
Steve Fabac
S.M. Fabac & Associates
816/765-1670
.

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