[asterisk-users] 'Traditional' Faxing

[Jonn R Taylor]

Greg Cockburn wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> the company I work for has an aging Digital PBX attached to an E1.
> 
> This PBX has a few analogue lines, one of which we use a 'traditional' 
> fax machine on.
> 
> I want to upgrade our PBX and Asterisk is almost a perfect fit.
> 
> The only problem I can't seem to find a working solution for is Faxing.
> 
> I don't want to use Hylafax or other similar methodologies.
> 
> I believe there maybe someway to bridge an Analogue FXS port to a 
> channel on the E1?
> 
> Basically I want to mimic what we have now.
> 
> 1. Any person can send a fax using the fax machine, and the PBX picks 
> the next free channel on the E1.
> 
> 2. A fax call can come over any channel on the E1, and the dialed number 
> is matched and sent to the analogue FXS port of the PBX to be received 
> by the fax machine.
> 
> Is there anyway I can do this in Asterisk that will work seamlessly?
> 
> I have not yet purchased any hardware, so recommendations would be 
> greatly appreciated.
> (I believe some of the problem exists due to timing, does any hardware; 
> E1 card / Analogue card; support linking a timing signal together?)
> Sangoma, Digium, Pika?
> 
> Thanks all for any help on this one.
> Greg.
> 
> 
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Greg,

There are alot of option for handeling faxes. One is to use iaxmodem and 
hylafax. This option works the best. You can try to use an analog 
adapter or card to connect a conventional fax to but this is not allways 
reliable. I have spent alot of time working on faxing with asterisk. If 
you need any help you can email me and I will send the links and scripts 
that I have to help you in your setup. FYI, They are all for RH/CentOS.

Hardware, how many phone and trunks do you plan on using? Digium cards 
for analog phone's and faxes work very well, linksys makes very good 
ATA's too. Digium or Sangoma T1 cards are the most suppoted that I have 
seen. but there are others.

OS, there are alot of different *nix OS's that are out there. Pick the 
one that you are the most comfortable to use. Asterisk was developed on 
RedHat though. Depending on your needs for support I would suggest 
either EL4 or CentOS4 with Asterisk 1.2. There are alot of people 
running 1.4 in production but the commercaial version of Asterisk is 
still on 1.2


Jonn