[plug] phone fax / answering machine

[Steve Boak]

On Tue, 27 Jul 2004 05:56 pm, Russ Powers wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Anybody out there use a linux box as an answering machine and fax
> send/receive? Any success stories?
>
> I have a fax/answering machine but I also have a server that's on all the
> time so it seems a waste of power having them both on all the time.
>
> I also change the answering machine settings depending on the time of day
> and day of the week. For instance weekends I set it to pick up immediately.
> But I have to do that manually and usually forget. It would be nice to have
> a cron job do it automagically.
>
> I've been looking around and most seem to involve using vgetty with a
> modem. Don't know how vgetty and linux would go with an on board modem or
> how this would impact adsl.
>
> I'd be interested in any decent gui's too. Didn't see much available.
>
> Thanks.

I have been investigating Astersk at http://www.asterisk.org/ for use as an 
exchange for Voice over IP phones (and *almost* have it working - I can dial 
out, but not get calls in yet :-). It has all the features you could want for 
voice menus, multiple message banks for extention numbers, and can be set up 
to change it's behavior at different times during the day. It comes with a 
whole host of recorded messages built in when you install it. Unfortunately 
it requires a telephone line interface card to do what you want, and as it is 
only just coming up to release status the documentation at 
http://www.voip-info.org/wiki-Asterisk is still a bit hard to follow.
It's probably a bit more complex than you were after and doesn't have it's own 
setup GUI, although there is a GUI add-on called 'actos' that may do the job. 
You will have to download the source and compile it yourself, but for me that 
was simply 'make' and 'make install' and it worked. Then you have to work out 
how to configure it :-)

Oh, I almost forgot - astersk does not do faxes, but you should be able to use 
your modem as the fax device (if it works as a regular modem under Linux) 
connected to your normal phone line without bothering your ADSL connection. 
Software wise, I don't know - I've never tried it.

By the way, does anyone else have a working implementation of asterix using 
IAX protocol that I could ask a few questions of?

Steve

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