[hylafax-users] Linux Magazine, July 2002, Administering a Fax Service

[Lee Howard <faxguy@howardsilvan.com>]

Editor,

I was greatly disappointed by AEleen Frisch's article in the July 2002 
issue of Linux Magazine entitled "Administering a Fax Service" about 
HylaFAX.

My first disappointment was in the fact that the author did not contact, 
interview, consult, or inform a single HylaFAX developer regarding the 
article or its publication.  Consequently the article is plagued with 
errors, misinformed statements, and incorrect conclusions.

Firstly, it appears that the author used or inspected HylaFAX version 
4.1beta2 or earlier in writing the article.  This version is at least 
three years old.  There have been several code releases since then, 
including countless enhancements.  Newer versions are widely solicited by 
HylaFAX.org, to which website the author even refers in the article and 
has me wondering if they even bothered to visit.

Secondly, it appears that the author used or inspected HylaFAX on a BSD 
system, which seems a bit ironic considering the publication the article 
appears in.  Even though the BSD and Linux HylaFAX installations are 
similar, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that some newbie got confused 
because of the differences of which the author did not take notice.  If 
the author didn't use a BSD system, then they used a version highly 
modified from the default installation.

So, considering that the article is written about a severely antiquated 
version of the software installed in a manner different than most readers 
would have, these are the errors, misinformed statements, and incorrect 
conclusions which I see:

* The author states that RedHat ships HylaFAX with its distribution.  This 
is incorrect.  To my knowledge, RedHat, one of the few distributions that 
does not, has never shipped HylaFAX as part of its distribution.
* The author makes repeated references to paths which are not HylaFAX 
defaults and which can usually vary greatly depending on how the package 
was installed.
* The current default spool directory for HylaFAX is /var/spool/hylafax, 
not /var/spool/fax.  The author makes repeated references to the old spool 
directory.
* In figure one, the author gives a sendfax command example which will 
communicate with localhost rather than dalton.ahania.com as implied, will 
use the default pagesize because "na_let" is a typo for "na-let", and will 
omit the from and regarding coverpage information specified on the command 
line.
* The author correctly indicates that faxgetty need not be used for 
send-only configurations, but this is actually the less-preferred method 
of establishing a send-only environment.
* The author uses "fax" as the inittab id value when on many systems the 
id value is limited to a two-character sequence.
* Although "/dev/ttyS0" would work as an argument to faxgetty, the proper 
way is to omit the "/dev/" prefix.  This is clearly documented in the 
manpages and website.
* The author states that "there is no utility to maintain or clean up the 
per-job log files", which is incorrect.  Apparently they missed the 
faxcron utility.
* The author implies that hfaxd only handles faxing from remote hosts.  In 
truth, hfaxd handles fax job submission from all hosts, local or remote.
* The author lists the document types which HylaFAX is capable of faxing 
by default, but omits PDF.
* The author states that "HylaFAX does not have an automated method of 
routing faxes to recipients".  This is untrue as HylaFAX is quite capable 
of routing incoming faxes based on CID, TSI, DID, and device.  Then the 
author goes on to confuse the reader with a hacked-up routing method based 
on "the incoming phone number" which transforms into the "originating 
phone number" by creating an etc/users file which would go unused unless 
the reader were to deliberately alter bin/faxrcvd to use an etc/users file.
* The author states that it "isn't usually a practical scheme" for HylaFAX 
to "be a central fax server that accepts fax jobs from other hosts".  If 
this is true, then there are countless numbers of businesses and 
individuals who are happily and productively doing the impractical with 
programs and services like TPC.INT, Cypheus, WHFC, Respond, and RelayFax 
(which HylaFAX client programs the author didn't even bother to mention).

All in all, I'm glad for the publicity which the article brings to 
HylaFAX.  However, I feel that the author would have done better to merely 
condense the information available in the HylaFAX HOW-TO 
(http://www.hylafax.org/howto) if they didn't have the time or interest to 
properly research and investigate the package.

Thanks,

Lee Howard
HylaFAX developer

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