Managing Faxes with HylaFAX
Today’s users expect their computing environment to provide a lot of services that used to be considered luxuries. Sending faxes from the desktop is one of them. These days, since most PCs come equipped with a modem, it’s not uncommon for the standalone fax machine to be eliminated.
Today’s users expect their computing environment to provide a lot of services that used to be considered luxuries. Sending faxes from the desktop is one of them. These days, since most PCs come equipped with a modem, it’s not uncommon for the standalone fax machine to be eliminated.
There are several open source faxing packages available for Linux systems. Perhaps the best known of them is HylaFAX (http://www.hylafax.org). In addition to sending and receiving faxes, HylaFAX can also act as a central fax server that accepts fax jobs from other hosts on the network. It maintains a queue of outgoing faxes, transmits them when it can, and delivers incoming faxes as email messages.
Let’s take a look at how to configure and manage HylaFAX.
Setting Up HylaFAX
Many Linux distributions, including Red Hat and SuSE, ship with the HylaFAX package already installed (if not, there are RPMs and source files available). After it’s installed, run the faxsetup script, which automates the initial configuration. It will ask you a series of questions about your system and how you want to use the package, then generate the appropriate HylaFAX configuration files based upon your answers.
There are quite a few configuration files that HylaFAX uses. Although faxsetup will generate them for you, it’s helpful to know what they are and what information they hold. The following are the most important configuration files:
