Just installed Hylafax on a Fedora 6 installation, and here are a few things I had to figure out. I have not looked at Hylafax for a few years, and it has not changed much in installation process but it is a very mature and active project.

We had a spare Pentium 3 box at work, and we needed a fax server to just receive fax’s from 2 lines, and forward them via email to one person that organizes them. I ordered a couple of modems of eBay, totalling $35, be sure they are Linux compatible. Stay away from Win Modems! The install went with no problems, just downloaded the latest RPM on the website and everything went well. Just follow the docs on the website, not much to it.

Setting up faxgetty in the inittab caused me a problem until I realized that I need to have a unique identifier on each line of the respawn command.

m0:2345:respawn:/usr/sbin/faxgetty ttyS2
m1:2345:respawn:/usr/sbin/faxgetty ttyS3

I then rebooted and then did a faxstat to see the status of Hylafax.

HylaFAX scheduler on fax.westprobenefitsystems.local: Running
Modem ttyS3 (+1.604.538.9895): Running and idle
Modem ttyS2 (+1.604.536.1552): Running and idle

I then searched for a local Fax Back service to test everything, and faxes came in and spooled to /var/spool/hylafax/recvq/

We want the faxes to be delivered to one person, so I went into /var/spool/hylafax/etc/FaxDispatch and changed the following line

SENDTO=myemail@mycompany.com;

I also wanted to have the fax number displayed in the notification email instead of the device name. This is what I added to the FaxDispatch

case “$DEVICE” in
ttyS2) DEVICE=604.555.1111;;
ttyS3) DEVICE=604.555.2222;;
esac