Hello Russell
On 13 Oct 2001, at 19:14, Russell Coker wrote:
> I have been thinking of implementing a way of telling Portslave to pass the
> port to another program to allow minicom or a FAX transmission to take the
> port.
I think the answer lies in by-passing radius. If we had a facility like
mgetty's "login.config" file which could decide whether to run a
radius based program, or a local one instead, the flexibility would
go up by an order of magnitude. It would also make hacks like my
UUCP one work.
Perhaps the same or a similar configuration file could tell portslave
how to handle incoming calls detected by the modem as being
voice or fax as opposed to data calls.
> > Is it possible to call up the patched pppd from mgetty and use
> > radius authentication and accounting?
> Sure you could have the mgetty detect the PPP frames and run pppd with
> appropriate parameters to load the Portslave library.
Is there a documentation for the new options on the patched pppd?
> > It would be realy nice if the above were true. It would also be nice if
> > we could combine mgetty with features of faxgetty from the hylafax
> > package. Then we could have one "answer the modem" package
>
> I've been thinking of doing that. However I have no fax hardware. If
> someone suggests which code I should use as a fax code base and is prepared
> to test it for me then I'll add fax support to Portslave.
In my opinion Hylfax is by far the best fax package. It allows Class
1 or Class 2 modems to be used. Mgetty's fax facility only allows
Class 2. As over 90% of domestic quality 56k modems either have
no Class 2 support, or Class 2 that is so buggy that it is not worth
using this is a big plus factor. (Almost all Windows faxing software
uses Class 1 mode.)
Hylafax has a "faxgetty" program that answers the modem. It allows
dial-out like mgetty, but it also communicates with the hylafax
daemon to report on the status of the modem. It has facilities for
calling alternate programs for voice and data calls. I am not sure if
it can detect ppp frames.
However the weak link is normally with the modems detection of the
type of the incoming call (voice, fax or data), which is not very
reliable. I am not sure if Class 1 modems can do this at all. On
commercial sites, I normally lock modems taking incoming fax calls
into "fax only" mode to guarantee satisfactory performance.
Faxgetty has a few features to try and work around this limitation.
A few other issues to consider:
- What about call-back, is there any provision for this in
portslave?
- Is anybody familiar with isdnutils? How does that handle all
the options of incoming calls?
- Can isdnutils handle radius authentication, filters, assigned
IP's etc? (Maybe it could share the radius plug in?)
Regards
Ian
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Ian Forbes ZSD
http://www.zsd.co.za
Office: +27 +21 683-1388 Fax: +27 +21 64-1106
Snail Mail: P.O. Box 46827, Glosderry, 7702, South Africa
---------------------------------------------------------------------
