VSI Fax?

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Hi,

On Tue, Apr 13, 1999 at 01:39:11AM +0000, Peter Caffin wrote:
> Gert Doering <gert@greenie.muc.de> wrote:
> > On Mon, Apr 12, 1999 at 02:19:44AM +0000, Peter Caffin wrote:
> >> I was just wondering if anyone had heard about or experienced using VSI
> >> Fax (particularly under Linux). I've been refered to this product by a
> >> manager who's been reading SCO World Nov/Dec 1998 (US magazines seem to
> >> take forever to make it to Australia)..
> 
> > Hmmm, this is fairly offtopic on this list... - VSI*FAX is a commercial
> > software, that costs real money and you don't get source code for it.
> 
> Sorry about the off-topicness, BTW. 

Never mind.  I just want to avoid having this list drift off too much into
Hylafax, VSI*FAX, ComFAX, ... issues.

> I suspected that I'd find a much
> better critique of it from here, though :). I'm really not all that keen
> on the idea, when there are other options for network faxing that could be
> bug-fixed given the time.

:)

> Unfortunately, I'm not really being given the time or adequate resources
> to work more on the LPD remote spooling concept of it, so management wants
> "the quick fix" *sigh*.

Hmmm.  I think you could use Eddie Carpenter's approach (abuse the job id
as "destination fax number"), and voila, you have network fax.  Or just
export /var/spool/fax/outgoing/ via NFS and run faxspool on the clients -
works fine if the number of machines is small, and all of them are
"trustworthy".

> If anyone is interested in taking a peek at what I managed to come up
> with (when I did have a bit of time), and would even like to help kill a
> few bugs, have a look at The Print-To-Fax Mini-HOWTO at
> http://it.net.au/~pc/comp/linux/print-to-fax.html.
> 
> Although it's nominally a Linux Documentation Project wannabe document,
> it's useful for any OS that can run mgetty-fax, magicfilter and LPRng.
> All useful suggestions for the doc will be credited (of course).

I'll see that I can find some time do look through this...

> > Besides that, it's said to be not bad.  Mgetty is a lot more flexible,
> > though :-) (but I certainly have to say that mgetty is better).
> 
> Without having looked at this VSI Fax myself, I'd agree. The way you've
> written mgetty is the logical way a fax/getty daemon should be written.

Some folks would certainly disagree.  I think that, for example, Hylafax
is a very good product - and it's written in a totally different way...

gert
-- 
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Gert Doering - Munich, Germany                             gert@greenie.muc.de
fax: +49-89-35655025                        gert.doering@physik.tu-muenchen.de