Fax from Windows

[Mark Symonds]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Brooklyn Linux Solutions CEO" <ruben at mrbrklyn.com>
To: <suse-linux-e at suse.com>; <samba at lists.samba.org>
Sent: Wednesday, May 02, 2001 7:05 AM
Subject: Fax from Windows 


> Hello
> 
> Does anyone have experience setting up Windows so that it can fax to a fax
> server on Linux.  I've tried setting up efax on the LP port and making it
> available under SMB but this didn't work.  GThere is no windows client
> which will let you put the phone number anywher ;)  Something I should have
> though of prior.
> 

This is exactly what I have been recently working on for a customer.  
The samba docs do contain some quick docs in English on how to 
do this with mgetty+sendfax but unfortunately it wasn't working over 
here and the comments in the script are German.  

So I started from scratch using some of the same ideas but using
efax and perl instead.

The trick is that you install a postscript printer (e.g. Apple Laserwriter)
on the windows machines and point it to the samba server.  Since 
postscript is plain text you can parse it for the phone number and then 
pass that off to efax (efax then automatically converts your postscript
document to fax format and sends it off.)   

This approach allows for some pretty serious magic because you 
can do things like email the windows user a fax transmittal report
indicating success or failure, write some cgi's which allow for managing
the fax-queue via the web etc. etc.

More info is here:

http;//www.symonds.net/~mark/pics/sendfax

I would genuinely appreciate any suggestions/contributions on improving 
the script (spaghetti; but it seems to be working quite well) ... also would like 
to document everything more clearly and maybe it could get included in the 
samba-docs?

-- 
Mark