The good ol' fax has gone
=========================

Not quite, it's still standing right next to the other computers, but 
it's turned off, waiting to be setup with another copy of FreeBSD to
play around with network stuff, maybe IPv6 (if I ever can find some time
to start playing with that). It has been the last pure DOS machine in
the house. All other  machines have long been migrated from DOS to Unix
or to OS/2 and from there (unfortunately, due to the lack of appropriate
applications on other platforms) further to Win95. The good old 486SX-25
has served me for about 5 years as fax machine. Hopelessly overpowered
for the task, but at that time it was the machine with the lowest spec I
had in the house, all the others were 486DX-33 (still the majority in my
farm).

Everyone is talking about TCO (Total Cost of Ownership), while, at the
same time, keeping most software updated to the latest version. As all
reports state, hardware costs are only a small piece of the whole TCO
cake; administration, training and troubleshooting is much more
expensive. In these terms, my fax machine has been a relatively cheap
system. I set it up with BitFax, which had come free with one of my
modems and never switched applications. Only once, I installed an
updated version of BitFax to gain some functionality I wanted.

What I always liked about BitFax is, that it is possible to write a fax
as a simple ASCII file using any text editor, even edlin (for those who
still know this one), include a special string and have that string
replaced with an image of my signature. No need to fire up a full
fledged graphical word processor, eating tons of RAM. Very small fax
files, for both sending and receiving faxes is another advantage;
storing one year worth of fax traffic, both inbound and outbound on a
single floppy disk? No problem, even though this is close to 100 faxes
in and as much out.

About three years ago I started sending international faxes over the
internet, simply because it was much cheaper. Meanwhile, most of my fax
traffic is international, so the fax machine has been running almost
exclusively for incoming faxes. As I do most of my computing work
remotely from my notebook, it often happened that I didn't notice
incoming faxes for a couple of days. I said to myself that if I could
get a notice by e-mail whenever a fax arrived, it would be much more
efficient. Also viewing faxes using a browser or the like, would be much
easier for my wife than going downstairs to the fax computer and operate
BitFax.

The 486DX-50 Unix (FreeBSD) server handles all the computing needs of my
home network. It is already a file-, print-, web-, mail-, pop-,
internet-gateway-, DNS-, and-so-on server, so why not add another item
to its task list? Plugging in another modem would make it a great
faxserver. I could have my e-mail notification without going through the
trouble of connecting the DOS machine via UUCP to the Unix server. For
my wife I could integrate it with the webserver, so she can access faxes
from her friends and parents much more easily. If I'm away for some
time, I'd have the possibility to have incoming faxes automatically sent
to me by e-mail...


mgetty+sendfax
--------------

Gert Doering is the author of a package called mgetty+sendfax. This is a
free and improved replacement of the getty process on Unix. getty is
responsible for picking up modems and providing callers with a login
prompt. mgetty, however, is much smarter. It can not only improve the
login, but also transparently handles UUCP calls and fax calls. The
second part of the package, sendfax, can be used for sending outbound
faxes. It is possible to build solutions to integrate sendfax with
windows and with e-mail, but I'm quite happy with my current internet
faxing. So it's only mgetty which I'm interested in.

On my test FreeBSD machine I started to setup mgetty v1.0.0. For
somebody who is trying for the first time to setup an application on an
Unix system, mgetty might not be the best thing to start with. It is not
quite as simple to setup as for example apache, or squid, or some other
much wider supported application, but following the instructions in the
manual, mixed with some intution and knowledge, it was not such a big
deal to install it and do a very basic configuration. After successfully
receiving a testfax, I changed some of the defaults to better fit my
purposes.

So far, so good. Getting the raw g3 fax files into a format suitable for
displaying in webbrowsers, was quite a bit more complicated. An utility
for converting the g3 files to pbm (portable bit map) is provided, but
GIF and JPG are the standards on the web. Now, I must confess, in terms
of graphical stuff, layout, design and so on, I'm not the right person
to talk to. I had no problem displaying the converted, or even original
files with utilities such as xv, or ImageMagick, but that was not what I
wanted. My goal was to serve the faxes through a webserver to a
graphical browser, such as Netscape. Converting the g3 or pbm files
using various utilities either produced files which were simply not
legible or far too big. After all, 2 MB per A4 page (about 15 KB in g3
format) is not only more than I can spend in terms of harddisk real
estate, but also more than you can anybody reasonably expect to download
to a webbrowser for viewing a couple of lines on a fax; not even if it
is on an inhouse network. This conversion problem kept me busy for quite
some time. Finally I also checked out an mgetty site (try
http://alpha.greenie.net/), downloaded a developement version of
mgetty+sendfax (v1.1.18) and a couple of additional utilities. There was
also a small c program called p2g.c (pbm to gif). It is small, fast,
simple and does exactly what I needed.

While mgetty v1.0.0 was the latest 'production' release, I tried out the
freshly downloaded v1.1.18 'developement' release and found it to work
fine for me. So, equipped with everything I needed, I finally set out to
install mgetty v1.1.18 on the production server.

interfacing with the webserver
------------------------------

mgetty can automatically execute a program whenever a fax has been
received as well as send e-mail. So for the e-mail notification there
wasn't any extra work to do, just make sure the configuration is ok. For
automatically adding received faxes to the web interface, I configured
mgetty to call a small shell script whenever a fax has been received.
The shell script actually is only a wrapper and currently does nothing
more than calling a python program. It would also have been possible to
call the python program directly, but the additional step has been
chosen to have a very easy way to add functionality temporarily, like if
I'm away for two weeks and want faxes to follow me.

The python program actually has two uses. If there are parameters passed
on the command line, it will process these parameters and add the newly
received fax to the web interface. From within the web interface, the
exactly same program is being called as a CGI. When called as a CGI,
there are no command line parameters and the program will scan the
environment variables for instructions on what action it is supposed to
take.

On the 'received faxes' page, each fax is listed with date, remote-ID,
number of pages and comment. The user has several possibilities. Of
course viewing is one thing. In the case of a multi page fax, it
currently is necessary to use the browser's refresh button for each
separate page, as the browser caches the previous faxpage even if the
caching function has been turned off. I'm sure there is some workaround
for this, but I haven't found it yet (hints by e-mail welcome!).Rotating
faxes for viewing is not yet implemented. The python program is only a
first 'scratch' version and one day I hope to clean it up and implement
the remaining features I was thinking of. In this scratch version there
is also one more annoyance when viewing a fax page: it is too big. Since
the resulting GIF image is being passed to the browser as is, and not
embedded in an HTML code, I don't know how to control it's height and
width. So at the moment some scrolling around the screen is needed for
reading the faxes. I also hope to take care of this later. If I can't
find a way to set dimensions for viewing, I'll most probably try to
shrink the image with the help of an imaging library which I recently
found.

Changing the comment for the fax and deleting the fax from the list
requires a password. Currently it is a hardcoded password for each
authorized user, but in the future I plan to use the Unix login
password.

With printing I probably was somewhat lucky. When viewing, the GIF is
too big and thus it also will not print nicely. But every computer in
the house is printing via the network on the printers attached to the
server. So instead of users printing locally on their machine, the print
button makes the python program execute g3tolj, which comes with mgetty.
g3tolj transforms the raw fax file from the g3 format to a format, which
can be passed to an HP LaserJet printer. Even though I do not have a
laser printer, it does work nicely with my HP DeskJet 520.


worthwile
---------

The switch from the long established BitFax machine to the Unix server
did take some time and effort. And not everything is in it's final state
yet, as the python program will still need some considerable brushup.
But for the moment it is working well enough, so I'll stay with this
'alpha' version until I finish the projects I'm currently working on.
All in all I would consider the change as worthwile: it did cost time,
but it saves a machine, offers more possibilities, is easier to handle
and as I'm regularly checking e-mail, incoming faxes aren't going
unnoticed any more for a whole week.

Kurt Keller - Kurt@pinboard.com