[Asterisk-Users] Fax service (instead of tdm card)

[tim panton]

On 13 May 2005, at 23:38, Terje Elde wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Sorry if this is too far off-topic, it sounds potentially  
> interesting to others though.  I'll be brief.
>
> Rich Adamson wrote:
>
>> I gave up (for now) trying to make spandsp work with the digium TDM
>> card. Instead, I signed up with www.trustfax.com at a cost of $9.95
>> per year plus $.10/page.  Since we only deal with an estimated 120
>> pages per year, the total cost of about $22/year seemed like a very
>> reasonable alternative. (At least until we can find out why the TDM
>> card does not function properly with spandsp.)
>>

I've just started playing with FAX, and I think  I've got a solution
that seems to work pretty well, others might want to try.

Some background: We don't send or receive large numbers of faxes,
and I run * on a slightly underpowered box (1Ghz Nemiah) so
I was very wary of running spandsp and tiff etc on the * box, given
that it has an E1 to manage and also does some transcoding to
GSM and G729.

As an experiment I plugged a spare port on a Sipura 2000 into the
modem socket of my Apple G5, configured the sipura and * to
only use alaw (the native codec of my E1 that goes into my * box),
configured * to send a spare DID to that sipura port
and told Macos X that it had a fax modem.

So I now have a solution which seems to work well.
The really cute thing is that the Apple presents the outbound fax
as a unix postscript printer, so any computers in the office
can print to it and send faxes!
Inbound the faxes get converted to PDF and
can be sent to email, printer or file,
or any mix of the above.

The only problem is night time faxes (from folks in other
timezones). I put the G5 in sleep mode when I leave the office.
In theory it should be possible to have the G5 wake up
from sleep mode when the fax line rings, but it seems to be
too slow for the sipura or something, the first attempt fails,
but if the sender retries before the G5 goes back to sleep,
then it works fine.

Given that the imac minis are only a few hundred dollars,
I thought this might be a solution that people would be interested in.

Tim.