Re: Hylafax and PPP?

[Leslie Mikesell <les@Mcs.Net>]

> It's not a preference, just that I've been running mgetty for some time now
> and I  new to HylaFAX. However, I am using mgetty to process dial-in, PPP,
> and FidoNet calls, AWA, FAX. My concern is that ALL these call types get
> processed correctly.
> 
> If I can get a confirmation;
> I run faxgetty on the port, in inittab.
> This hands the call off to mgetty if it's not a FAX call.
> mgetty can then handle the dial-in/PPP/FidoNet call as normal
> mgetty's FAX capabilities are disabled.

Yes, assuming you have a class 2 modem set for auto-detect, the
modem will say DATA and faxgetty will exec the specified at
compile-time with the arguments from the per-modem config file.
As long as your arguments and/or config file convince mgetty
that the call is up and in data mode already it should work
the way you want.

> >I always thought someone should glue a 'built-in' getty
> >for data into faxgetty (keeping the external one as an option) since
> >there is next to nothing involved when the modem speed is locked and
> >it already knows about utmp entries.  Then it could do the same trick
> >as mgetty to auto-detect PPP without having to exec an intermediate
> >program.  (Of course I've been too lazy to try this myself...).
> 
> It's a little more complex than that. PPP isn't the only thing folks dial
> into a Unix system for. There's normal shell dial-in, FidoNet mailer
> support, PPP (of course), RADIUS server support., UUCP (still around
> folks), plus proprietary/custom special purpose program support (weather
> station, data logging support, etc). 

I forgot that mgetty handles fidonet as another special case like PPP.
Other than that, shell and uucp (and anything else that goes
through login) are handled simply by displaying the /etc/issue
file, issuing the initial prompt, accepting one line of input,
then exec'ing login with that as it's argument.  Compared to
the other stuff faxgetty does, that's pretty trivial.  I didn't
mean for faxgetty to omit login capability, just that it already
has the line in the right mode so it doesn't need a real getty
to process gettydefs/ttydefs and reset everything again before
invoking login.  Why exec a 30k+ program to output a single
prompt?

Les Mikesell
  les@mcs.com