RE: flexfax: Hylafax future

[Robert Colquhoun <rjc@trump.net.au>]

Gary
Thats pretty much what both whfc and response do - the problem is handling
the fax number to be dialled.

What i was getting at is that both are user-level applications rather than
drivers and are difficult to setup particularly if you have to do a lot of
clients.  Each client computer has to have whfc/response continually
running on the client computer.

I was thinking of a proper windows driver which would have an automatic
setup and only ran when the client printed or wanted to view the queue.

I've basically decided there are two ways to do this:

Method A - SMB, Samba method - You need to setup the server to run Samba to
do SMB networking, setup a SMB shared directory ie \\HylaServer\fax which
contains some special files through which server and client communicate ie
FIFOs sort of like /proc under linux(MS-Fax and response use this method)
Advantages - seems to be the standard way for windows network printers to
operate
Disadvantage - you have to get Samba working on your server as well

Method B - hfaxd method - directly contact the hylafax daemon, a sort-of
ftp code to communicate between client and server.(whfc uses this method)
Advantages - only need hylafax working(better security)
Disadvantages - slightly more complicated client

At the moment i'm favoring method B but am open to suggestions.

PS Other people have tried to reverse engineer the MS-Fax protocol ie no
need for a special client but as yet noone as far as i know has succeeded.

PPS Sorry for the long post

- Robert

At 16:09 16/09/97 +0800, Gary Ng (Winclient) wrote:
>
>> Have you looked at the 'respond' program at
>> http://www.Boerde.DE:81/~horstf/?
>> It is really done for mgetty/sendfax, but it would only take a change
>> in the command line to submit to hylafax instead.
>> The idea is that you set up a windows printer to send postscript to
>> a samba queue on the server where you run sendfax.  When the samba
>> server receives the job it runs a perl script that connects back to
>> the sender, where the 'respond' program pops up a dialog box to
>> ask for the destination which it passes back to the perl script.
>> Not as elegant as a print driver that understands hfaxd protocol but
>> it looks usable...
>> 
>	Since it seems that hylafax can handle postscript, there is
>actually
>	a better solution. Just setup a printer that instead goes to a
>samba
>	queue, goes to named-pipe. Write a program that would create and
>	listen to the pipe thus received the output. In this program, do
>the
>	hfaxd stuff and any other things.
>
>	Gary
>