Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (1702 mails)

["Brian K. White" <brian@xxxxxxxxx>]

Philipp Thomas wrote:
> * David C. Rankin (drankinatty@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx) [20090904 14:45]:
>
>   
> >      I'll work on packaging it. How hard can it be? It's just a web app and 
> > only 
> > requires modifications 3 files in /var/spool/hylafax/...
> >     
>
> I've taken a (a bit cursory) look at avantfax myself and I'd say it needs
> some *major* work:
>
> 1) There is no place you could possibly move the whole avantfax
>    directory. Simply moving it to something like /var/www is impossible! It
>    looks like several directories are needed, some of them below /usr/lib,
>    others below /var/lib and /var/cache and so on.  *Then* you need to adapt
>    the php scripts to the changed paths.
>
> 2) Replacing files from hylafax with symlinks to avantfax replacements is
>    a no-go for rpm packages. The name of the scripts to call must be made
>    configurable *in Hylafax*.
>
> 3) Having a sudoers entry for HTTPDUSER that includes /sbin/reboot and
>    /sbin/halt will earn you some discussion with our security folks.
>
> 4) You can't simply start all services you need from an rpm package.
>    IMNSHO the only clean solution would be an init script that depends
>    on all services that avantfax needs but otherwise does nothing more
>    than report status.
>
> 5) As we don't have any means for interactive installation a rather
>    extensive README needs to be written that explains the user what
>    and how to configure.
>
>   
> > I hope SuSE will see fit to use var/spool/hylafax instead of using a
> > /custom directory and being out of sync with the rest of the Linux
> > /community.
> >     
>
> Hylafax currently needs a new maintainer, which can be anyone from the
> community.  This maintainer could change the default to
> /var/spool/hylafax , though he would have to regard the update path.
>
> Philipp
>   

Does this new hylafax have the -j option to sendfax  and the event
trigger script ( /var/spool/hylafax/etc/FaxAccounting, intended for
accounting but also proivides the perfect place to insert any kind of
database or application integration you want) from HylaFAX+  ?

The problem with the 'official' hylafax is that the maintainers, ifax,
sell db integration as a commercial enhancement, and so they are
dismotivated to provide such features in hylafax for free. But hylafax+
has them. I was maintaining hylafax+ myself for a while but I found that
someone else is already maintaining a nice package in OBS and it's been
working fine.

ifax and the regular hylafax web site tries to discredit hylafax+ as an
inferior (or at least pointless) offshoot, but, until these features or
something of equivalent or better functionality are in hylafax, I won't
use it. Can't actually. I need to be able to associate individual fax
jobs with various records in my application, and I need to be able to
have the application look up the current status of any fax job.
Not all jobs are submitted in such a way that the app can collect a fax
reqeast number from sendfax at submit time and track the job that way,
but they can attach metadata about the job to the fax, which the app can
then look for later.

VSI-FAX has that as a built in feature since decades ago, yet hylafax
still doesn't have it. But I can emulate one of vsi-fax's features with
the -j option in hylafax+'s sendfax. Which is, -j allows you to supply a
free form comment with a fax request, and that comment gets saved along
with the rest of the fax job details, and can be included in the faxstat
output, and so, you can embed special strings in -j and then search for
them in sendfax. This sorta-kinda-good-enough emulates the feature of
"user tags" in vsifax where you can submit arbitrary extra info with a
fax job, and it goes into it's own extra field in vsifax's back end
database, and then you can use those fields to search for fax jobs later
efficiently. By asking for all of the faxes submitted by company-z, or
all of the faxes associated with invoice-#n, etc..

The FaxAccounting script is essentially the same as another key
integration feature of vsi-fax which they call
event-notification-procedure scripts. Basically shell scripts that you
can put whatever you want in them, and they run any time the status of
any fax changes. So you use them to update external databases, send
emails print things etc.. whatever weird thing you want that there isn't
already a built-in function for.
Vsi-fax has a bunch of different scripts that will run under different
conditions or for different phases of a fax job, and FaxAccounting is
basically a single script that runs at a few of the main points in the
life of a fax job, so it's simpler than vsifax, but it's still perfectly
fine.

And, our fax server, which receives and sends tons of faxes a day 24/7
via a full T1 fax board installed right in the box as well as a varying
number of regular modems on pots lines, and receiving outgoing fax jobs
from 20 or so remote application servers, has been chugging just fine
without a blip running hylafax+ for years, so,
stability/performance/reliability are no concern that I can see.

http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home://aljex/openSUSE_11.1/x86_64/hylafax-5.2.9-5.1.x86_64.rpm
which really comes from here:
https://build.opensuse.org/package/show?package=hylafax-plus&project=home:DocB

-- 
bkw

-- 
To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxx
For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@xxxxxxxxxxxx