AsterFax provides an email (SMTP) Fax gateway for the transmission of
faxes using Asterisk.
Beta 5 continues to add additional functionality as per the roadmap
laid out on the
AsterFax home page (http://asterfax.sourceforge.net).
Beta 5 includes a number of new features as well as numerous bug fixes.
The main new features are:
*Integration with existing SMTP servers
Integration with existing SMTP servers (e.g. sendmail, postfix,
Exchange Server).
Integration is done via a tool such as procmail which is used to
extract email messages
out of the mail servers processing pipeline. The messages are placed in
a directory
which AsterFax monitors. AsterFax then picks the messages up and faxes.
As yet the documentation does not included details on configuring
procmail to work
with AsterFax but it is on the agenda. If any one would like to
contributue installation
instructions it would be greatly appreciated.
*Audit Trail
An audit trails is now created in the logs directory (logs/audit.log)
which records
details of each fax transmitted. The log file is configured via
log4j.xml and the
default configuruation rolls the audit file over each night.
*Improved debugging of Open Office integration
The AsterFax.xba macro file for OpenOffice has been updated to output
debugging
information if required.
The output path is currently hardcoded to
'/usr/lib/asterfax/logs/ooconvert.log'
and you will need to manually modify the source if you require the log
file to
be placed in an alternate location.
You can turn on OpenOffice debugging by setting the
<AsterFax><Settings><Debug><Converter>
to the word True. You also need to set
<AsterFax><Settings><Debug><Enabled> to True.
*Improved debugging
An option now exists to turn on debugging for the txfax application as
well as to
preserve temporary files which can assist in diagnosing problems.
**Upgrade Instructions
Note: The AsterFax.xml configuration file has changed considerably and
you will need to
replace your existing file.
Remember to copy across any settings that you manually did to the prior
version.
Shutdown the AsterFax daemon.
Backup your existing AsterFax install directory.
Unzip the release files into /usr/lib/asterfax.
Reapply any changes you made to config/AsterFax.xml.
Copy the bin/AsterFax.xba to the OpenOffice macro directory as per the
standard installation notes.
Restart OpenOffice
Restart the AsterFax daemon.
Run the test suite as per the standard installation instructions.
The directory /usr/spool/asterfax/outbox is no longer used. Instead
tiff files
are now saved directly into the the directory /usr/spool/asterisk/fax.
As such you
need to be certain that AsterFax (and asterisk) has read/write
permission to this directory.