asterisk users - Dec 2005 - Fax Support

Can anyone guide me enabling fax support in asterisk. I tried spandsp
patch but was unsuccessful. Because patch for chan_sip.c was not proper
for asterisk's version 1.2.1. Can anyone help me adding fax support in
asterisk 1.2.1.

I was able to get spandsp "spandsp-0.0.2pre21.tar.gz" working in
1.2.1, but
you must manually copy the patch changes over to the Makefile in the 
\usr\src\asterisk\apps directory.  I followed the following directions found 
by googling "asterisk spandsp".

======
Make sure libtiff is installed on your machine. Versions 3.5.7, 3.6.0 and 
3.7.1 seem to work OK. There have been several bugs related to FAX document 
handling in some recent versions of libtiff. Also, some people have had 
trouble using spandsp because they had more than one version of libtiff on 
their machine. Take care with this. You will also need libxml2 installed. 
The FAX facility does not use this, but some other parts of spandsp do. If 
you are using an RPM based system, such as RedHat or Fedora, you will need 
the libtiff, libtiff-devel, libxml2 and libxml2-devel RPMs installed.



Use the usual:



./configure

make

make install



process to build the spandsp library. Note that if you use configure in this 
way, the software will be installed in /usr/local. In this case make sure 
your /etc/ld.so.conf file has an entry for /usr/local/lib and then run 
'ldconfig' command.



Next, put app_rxfax.c, app_txfax.c and Makefile.patch in your Asterisk apps 
directory. Use the command:



patch <Makefile.patch



within the apps directory, to patch your make file so it will build the new 
application. If the patching process fails, don't be too surprised. The 
patch file was generated for a specific revision of Asterisk, and things 
change. It would be difficult to produce a completely generic patch. If you 
look through the patch, and the Makefile, I think most people should be able 
to work out what is needed. Now rebuild and install Asterisk.  (I had to 
manually insert the +lines data from the patch to the Makefile, and be sure 
to observe TABs as space char are not acceptable and halted the compiler.)



Now if you put something like:



exten => 1234567,1,rxfax(/home/steveu/testfax.tif)



in your Asterisk extensions.conf file, a call to "1234567" should
invoke the
fax facility, to receive a fax to the file /home/steveu/testfax.tif. 
Alternatively:



exten => 1234567,1,txfax(/home/steveu/testfax.tif)



in your Asterisk extensions.conf file will cause a call to "1234567"
to
invoke the fax facility to send the file /home/steveu/testfax.tif to a 
calling fax machine. When sending a fax it is more likely you will be 
calling out to the remote FAX machine. In this case, make your Asterisk call 
the far FAX machine, and when it answers do:



exten => 1234567,1,txfax(/home/steveu/testfax.tif|caller)



The addition of "|caller" will make txfax act as a calling machine,
rather
than an answering machine.




----- Original Message ----- 
From: <rbrahmbhatt@adiance.com>
Newsgroups: gmane.comp.telephony.pbx.asterisk.user
Sent: Friday, December 30, 2005 1:17 PM
Subject: Fax Support


Can anyone guide me enabling fax support in asterisk. I tried spandsp
patch but was unsuccessful. Because patch for chan_sip.c was not proper
for asterisk's version 1.2.1. Can anyone help me adding fax support in
asterisk 1.2.1.


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On Sat, 2005-12-31 at 16:45 -0600, LJ wrote:
> exten => 1234567,1,rxfax(/home/steveu/testfax.tif)
I email pdf files, this requires a few extra packages, but I feel its
the easiest way to deal with it.  I have a macro that calls a shell
script and all to do  this.  Its based off work of others, I dont know
who they are, but here is what I do.  Its fairly trivial and fairly
painless if the underlying components are installed and working.

DEPENDS:
	spandsp & rxfax
	libtiff (should include tiff2pdf)
	mime-construct
	everything else should be standard on an asterisk server
          (bourne shell, asterisk, etc)


in AEL
macro faxreceive( email ) {
        rxfax(/tmp/${UNIQUEID}.tiff);
        system(/usr/sbin/mailfax /tmp/${UNIQUEID}.tiff ${email}
${CALLERIDNUM});
};


In extensions.conf

[macro-faxreceive]
exten => s,1,rxfax(/tmp/${UNIQUEID}.tiff)
exten => s,2,system(/usr/sbin/mailfax /tmp/${UNIQUEID}.tiff ${arg1}
${CALLERIDNUM})


Then just call it 
in AEL
&faxreceive(moo@ojnk.com);

extensions.conf
exten => 12345,1,macro(faxreceive,moo@ojnk.com)

Using a database or something you can dynamically get the email address
on a per user basis.  Fairly trivial to do, course an AGI could do this
as well.


The mailfax script
#!/bin/sh

FAXFILE=$1 
RECIPIENT=$2
FAXSENDER=$3 
PDFTMPFILE=${FAXFILE}.pdf
PDFFILE=`date +fax-%Y%m%d%H%M%S.pdf`

tiff2pdf -o /tmp/${PDFTMPFILE} -z -p letter \
  -c "creator such as your company name" \
  -a "author such as your company name" \
  -t "Fax from ${FAXSENDER} to ${RECIPIENT}" \
  -s "Fax from ${FAXSENDER} to ${RECIPIENT}" ${FAXFILE}

mime-construct --to $RECIPIENT \
  --subject "Fax from $FAXSENDER" \
  --attachment ${PDFFILE} --type application/pdf \
  --file /tmp/${PDFTMPFILE}

rm -f /tmp/${PDFTMPFILE} /tmp/${FAXFILE}



-- 
Trixter http://www.0xdecafbad.com     Bret McDanel
UK +44 870 340 4605   Germany +49 801 777 555 3402
US +1 360 207 0479 or +1 516 687 5200
FreeWorldDialup: 635378
http://www.sacaug.org/ Sacramento Asterisk Users Group
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