[Asterisk-Users] Asterisk and Hylafax, on the same box

[Armin Schindler]

On Fri, 31 Mar 2006, Mike wrote:
> Armin,
> 
> Thanks a lot for the very detailed answer.  I'll have to take a long look at
> the CAPI interfaces and see how I can pull all this off, it's all very new
> to me, but at least I understand that with an Eicon card, I could share a T1
> between Asterisk and Hylafax.  I'm not clear on whether I could receive fax
> and voice on the same DID though (if its Fax, Hylafax takes care of it, if
> its voice, Asterisk does)...

Fax and voice on the same DID is not possible when using a second 
application like hylafax. Because how should the two applications decide 
which one accepts the call?

But you can receive faxes with chan-capi (when you have an Eicon can with 
DSPs which does fax-processing on board). Here you can use the dialplan to 
decide what to do with the call.
I do this in a company (OpenPBX in that case, but it's the same), I receive 
faxes via CAPI and sending is done with another application.

Armin
 
> Mike
> 
>   
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: asterisk-users-bounces at lists.digium.com
> [mailto:asterisk-users-bounces at lists.digium.com] On Behalf Of Armin
> Schindler
> Sent: March 31, 2006 7:20 AM
> To: Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion
> Subject: Re: [Asterisk-Users] Asterisk and Hylafax, on the same box
> 
> On Fri, 31 Mar 2006, Olivier Krief wrote:
> > 2006/3/31, Armin Schindler <armin at melware.de>:
> > 
> > > Yes, this is possible of course with the Eicon Diva Server PRI (T1)
> card.
> > > This card provides a CAPI interface where you can connect 
> > > Asterisk(with
> > > chan-capi) and any other CAPI based application like Hylafax.
> > >
> > > You can e.g. configure chan-capi to use 20 channels and the 
> > > remaining channels configured in Hylafax.
> > > When you use a Eicon Diva Server with DSPs on board, you don't need 
> > > to worry about CPU power, because fax-receive is done on the DIVA 
> > > card.
> > > So you don't need to 'bridge' something here, it just works.
> > >
> > > Armin
> > 
> > 
> > Armin,
> > 
> > Do you mean you could dynamically share E1/T1 channels between 
> > Asterisk and Hylafax applications ?
> 
> Yes, CAPI provides all available controllers (ports) and its channels to
> every application at the same time.
> 
> > For example, for each incoming call to a given fax number, Capi driver 
> > would trigger Hylafax software to process incoming fax and at the same 
> > time, Asterisk software would be smart enough to use other channels 
> > for outgoing calls ?
> 
> Yes, via the CAPI interface you don't reference a real b-channel, this is
> done by the driver of the ISDN card which provides the CAPI interface.
> 
> Using CAPI, the applications can (and have to) decide which calls they want
> to get signaled or which are ignored when they are meant for another
> service. E.g. the following example is not possible with CAPI:
> You have one number (and the same BC) for two services assigned. If you are
> using one application, which can switch to another server by some rule, then
> it is okay. But two applications must be configured to serve the own
> numbers/services only.
> Another thing is, the application does not know about busy channels. This
> means if you have a 23 channel line and 10 lines are busy with hylafax at
> the moment, then chan-capi (or another application) can use 13 channels
> only, of course. So if you have configured chan-capi with e.g. 15 channels
> to use, chan-capi will just return 'busy : no circuit/channel available'.
> But this is all configuration stuff and when configured correctly, it works
> very good.
> 
> There are even more capabilities. For example Eicon is doing a lot. Their
> Diva Server cards do provide a RTP interface via CAPI (new chan-capi will
> support this). Which means coding and anti-jitterbuffer is done on the ISDN
> card, chan-capi just 'pushes' the RTP packets onto the card...
> 
> With rcapid and a patched version of the libcapi.so, you can even have the
> ISDN hardware on one server and the applications on other servers connected
> via CAPIoverTCP (bintec protocol in that case).
> I use this because my faxing application (just the capifaxrecvd) runs on my
> local maschine instead of the ISDN/Asterisk/Gateway server.
>  
> > If this understanding is correct, what is the downside ?
> > Why don't everybody use chan-capi ?
> 
> CAPI comes originally from the Windows world, but is a common ISDN API
> standard www.capi.org. So if there would be CAPI drivers for all of these
> ISDN cards, you can use CAPI (chan-capi).
> So the missing part is the card-driver. Currently I know of three CAPI based
> hardware:
> 1) Eicon Diva Server (all cards including analog ports) with full CAPI 2.0 
>    and VoIP/T.38 extensions.
> 2) AVM (basic CAPI 2.0)
> 3) mISDN driver for passive cards (hscx/hfc/...)
>    and on BSD with i4b!
> 
> 
> 
> Armin
> 
> (www.chan-capi.org ;-)
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