Release notes for AsterFax version 1.0
beta 8
AsterFax provides an
Email to Fax gateway for the transmission of faxes using Asterisk.
Asterisk
is an
Open Source PBX (or PABX)
integrating PSTN telephone lines and VOIP into a single solution,
providing all of the functionality
of a high end PBX; and best of all its
free!
AsterFax builds on the services provided by Asterisk to provide a full
fledged email based Fax Gateway.
What that means is that with AsterFax and Asterisk you can
send faxes from your desktop using your standard
email client without have to install any software on your desktop.
AsterFax can translate a normal email message into a fax
message. You simply enter the destination phone
number in the 'To' address, compose your email message and click send.
Its that easy.
For more formal correspondence AsterFax also supports a
growing number of file formats such as PDF, Tiff,
Postscript, MS-Word and OpenOffice Writer. You can either
attach the file to your email message or for
applications such as MS-Word and OpenOffice you can fax directly from
the applications by using the 'Send
Email' option. The resulting email is sent as a fax message.
Beta 8 provides a number of bug fixes and feature enhancements
Support for Landscape
Thanks to Frank Eyermann for providing a patch for supporting
document in landscape mode.
Any
document type which is supported by AsterFax can now be sent in
landscape mode. This is great for spreadsheets and word documents which
require wide formatting.
Send mail integration
After
consulting a number of sendmail guru's it became obvious that procmail
is not required to integrate sendmail with AsterFax.
We know have a simple relaying based soluition which will work with any
mail server.
This allows clients to send a fax from the standard email client
without requiring any reconfiguration.
See the page on integrating AsterFax with send mail for more details.
Retry Logic and Error handling
After
a major effort TxFax is now able to retrieve transmission errors from
txfax. This required patching txfax to send a UserEvent.
We also
cleaned up txfax to provide a more consistent set of error code with
respect to running txfax (as appposed to transmission errors).
The
end result is that AsterFax now contains retry logic that works and is
now providing semi-reasonable error messages. There is still work to be
done to translate the error messages into plain english as apposed to
techno babble.
Initial support for RTF files
Some initial work has been done to support Rich Text File's
(RTF). A converter now exists but has had only limited testing.
Cleanup of log messages
A
fair bit of work has been undertaken to improve the log output so that
in the standard shipping configuration the log messages are helpful.
We have also included some standard appenders specifically designed for
creating debug logs.
**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.
- Shut-down 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.
- Check the 'Configuring AsterFax' page for additional notes on
configuring AsterFax.xml
- Apply the TxFax patch by running modules/install.sh
- Restart Asterisk
- Restart the AsterFax daemon.
- Run the test suite as per the standard installation instructions.