Hylafax Installation for Oscar

Hylafax is a great, reliable fax server. It works with almost any fax modem. The main web page is at www.hylafax.org

Oscar instructions cab be found at: http://oscarmanual.org/oscar_emr_12/developers/hylafax/hylafax

I’ve installed another Open Source program that does OCR. It’s called tesseract-ocr code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/

To install hylafax just type: sudo apt-get install hylafax-server

sudo faxaddmodem
ttyS0 is the default serial modem
ttyACM0 is used for USB modems

sudo adduser [faxuser] uid=1002 pass=faxpass
faxadduser -a [adminpass] -p [userpass] -u [uid] [username]

Now, once hylafax has saved the incoming fax as a .tif image, I generate a .pdf AND a .txt file containing the OCRed data.

Ubuntu notes:
/var/spool/hylafax/bin/faxrcvd processes incoming faxes.
/var/spool/hylafax/bin/tiff2pdf can convert .tif files to .pdf
/var/spool/hylafax/recvq is the folder that contains the incoming faxes (in .tif format).
/var/spool/hylafax/log contains the log of each call.
/var/log/hylafax contains the program logs

Configuration:
/etc/hylafax/config.ttyS0 – has parameters for the modem on COM1:
AreaCode: 514
FAXNumber: +1.514.555.1212
RecvFileMode: 0600 is the default for the received file mode. I change it to 0644
LocalIdentifier: Oscar Fax Machine

Customization:
/var/spool/hylafax/etc/FaxDispatch is where you can add code to convert and/or redirect the incoming faxes. It is called from the faxrcvd script.

The following can be added to FaxDispatch to automatically convert incoming faxes (.tif) to adobe (.pdf)
if [ -f $FILE ]; then
/var/spool/hylafax/bin/tiff2pdf -o ${FILE}.pdf $FILE
chmod 644 ${FILE}.pdf

fi

Client software:
If you want to view the incoming faxes or use Hylafax to send faxes, there are a number of Hylafax compatible clients that you can use. On my Windows Vista PC, I am currently using YajHFC (Yet another java Hylafax Fax Client). Since this is a Java client, it should also work on Linux and Mac.

Another simpler option is to make the incoming fax folder shared (using Samba) and allow access to the folder.

Links:
edoceo.com/liber/network-hylafax-samba

Checking Hylafax status

Oscar v12 has a feature to check the status from the Admin menu. Admin, Misc, Fax Status

If that doesn’t work, or if you want to do it manually, here is the procedure:

1) start putty
2) login to server
3) check status: sudo faxstat
If you do not see the message from step 5), continue to 4)
If the server is Running and idle, then the problem is not the server.

4) restart hylafax: sudo service hylafax restart
5) check status: sudo faxstat
Server should answer: HylafaFAX scheduler on servername: Running
Modem ttyUSB0 (+1.514.555.1234): Running and idle

6) exit