Feature request for vgetty

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Hi,

On Wed, Oct 07, 1998 at 02:48:51AM +0200, Kurt Fitzner wrote:
> I don't know exactly what to call this, except that it is a feature that some
> Supra modems used to have.  It shouldn't be too hard to implement, though.
> 
> I have only one line, but would like to get faxes into my home oon my voice
> line.  It would be nice if vgetty -always- answered the line, even after the
> phone is picked up.  Most modems cannot detect when another phone has been
> picked up, but they all know when the line stops ringing.
> 
> So, if the phone rings, but doesn't ring enough for vgetty to answer
> normally, then as soon as it detects the ringing has stopped (say, 5 or 10
> seconds after the last ring) have it pick up the line and just listen.  If it
> hears a CNG tone, then it can go into fax mode right away.  If it doesn't
> hear a CNG tone, then it can hang up after 10 seconds and reset. 

I'm not sure whether this will work.  Usually, modems do not answer
"silently", but start sending their own answering tones quit quickly - so
this will be very disturbing to the human who picked up the phone call.
Supra's "silent answer" feature is different, and especially made for this
scenario.

In addition, I don't think this is a feature that should go into mgetty.
It will mainly be useful in shared-phone-line scenarios, which isn't
really what mgetty was designed for, but will make maintenance harder.
The "RING handler" code is already quite messy, and needs rewrite these
days, which is hard because of all the stuff that's already there
(ringback, nologin, caller ID, vgetty's dynamic change of the number of
desired RINGs, ...).

gert
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Gert Doering - Munich, Germany                             gert@greenie.muc.de
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