The Labs.Com System Lab Telephony

The Labs - Design & Functionality For The Net

mgetty+sendfax+vgetty: modem, fax and voicemail

If you want to run your modem under UNIX to do more than just dial-up but fax, and voicemail stuff, here we go. Be prepared to invest a lot of time to get things to run, mainly for configuration, here some assistance.

1. General Sites
2. mgetty+sendfax
3. vgetty + vm
4. ...

LinuxTelephony.Org Good site

... more links follow

Telephony 2. mgetty+sendfax

mgetty gives you access to the modem and its features (e.g. fax receive and sending), it is considered as 'core' application, and front-end programs usually use mgetty but you rarely use mgetty yourself or by hand.

mgetty Homepage Starting point

mgetty FAQ Highly recommend

/dev/modem

First step I recommend a symbolical link  ln -s /dev/ttyS1 /dev/modem  instead of ttyS1 (COM2) use ttyS0 (COM1) or whereever you have your modem connected to.

Configuration

Study first your modem Handbook carefully to see what features and limitation it may have according the .config files. This part is probably most time-consuming, check /etc/mgetty+sendfax/ directory (or /usr/local/etc/mgetty+sendfax depending of your installation): dialin.config, faxrunq.config, login.config, mgetty.config and sendfax.config.

... more infos later

Telephony 3. vgetty + vm

While setting up a telephone/voicemail-system under UNIX I encountered several things to be considered. vgetty is based on mgetty and provides additional tools to handle the voicemail features of your modem.

Obtaining vgetty

Major distributions provide the package already, you may have in on your system already installed. I recommend that you get it from the ports (*BSD or Debian) or RPM-file from the CD (SuSE or RedHat). If you have spare time, then obtain the mgetty-sources and apply the vgetty-patch to it (that's truly wasting time IMHO). vgetty Homepage get the patch for mgetty to make vgetty

Configuration

Check /etc/mgetty+sendfax/voice.conf (or /usr/local/etc/...voice.conf) carefully, and make the required changes.

WAV to the Modem

record your WAV-file (or convert it form another format) wavtopvf converts WAV to PVF pvfspeed adjusts the sampling rate pvftormd is the final converter, call pvftormd -L to see all modes; note: some modes only work with 7200, or 8000 Hz sampling-rate. Test your conversion:  % pvfspeed -s 7200 messages/root.pvf | pvftormd Elsa 4 > root.rmd   % vm play -s -v root.rmd  If you don't get the sampling-rate correct, you find in /var/log/mgetty.* a message saying something like 'wrong modem-type found', which actually means, the .rmd file was encoded not for your modem.

Installing vgetty

Check your /etc/inittab for the line about the 'initdefault', e.g. level 2 or 3, then put following line into /etc/inittab:  S1:345:respawn:/usr/sbin/vgetty modem  defining it for run-level 3, 4 and 5. Then kill -1 1 as root.

Telephony 4. ...

... more infos later

                                                                                                                                   

Wireless

System Lab

Human Interface