Fun With Setting Up Hylafax, Part One

Okay, I admit it: I'm a Windows user. I've used Windows all my life. Sure, I've played around in Ubuntu here and there, and the Gnome desktop is great. Even KDE is nice and intuitive. Stick me at a Bash prompt, though, and "ls" is about all I know. That, and to avoid "vi" at all costs unless I want to reboot the machine, since I can't get out of vi or vim.

Well, that was Monday. Today is Friday, and I've spent the week learning my way around Bash a bit. I've spent considerable amounts of time getting used to emacs & nano, which are much more intuitive than vi or vim, and using ssh to connect directly to the machine's terminal window rather than using TightVNC or the VMWare Infrastructure Client to play around in Gnome, since it's faster to go straight to the terminal.

Why am I going through all of this? Well, besides the fact that I've been meaning to learn Linux for quite some time, I need a fax server. We already have GFI Faxmaker, but it's only for one line, and the server only has one PCI slot. We need more than that, and if I go above four, GFI costs extra; not something I can head towards, since I've been told to "make do with what I have" in terms of IT budget. That means open-source solutions are afoot.

So I learned about Hylafax from a friend's son, who happens to be a Linux geek. You can learn more about Hylafax from www.hylafax.org. Needless to say, the installation and usage should've been relatively painless, but I inadvertently threw my own monkey wrench in there with one thing: The VMWare ESXi Hypervisor. For some reason, it simply refuses to recognize any local COM ports on the hypervisor machine, which I would then forward to the host machine.

I finally discovered this after using cu -hl ttyS0 caused the terminal to lock up again and again.

Now, I'm downloading the machine's virtual disk files locally from the hypervisor's datastore. I'll wipe the hypervisor box, install Windows XP, then load the VMWare Desktop hypervisor. Windows XP plays nicer with faxmodems, so we'll see if I can forward the COM ports that way.

Time will tell; I'll post an update with my results later. And yes, for those of you who have also read the documentation and set up your own Hylafax server, I DID name the virtual machine "Hylamonster." It'll be a cuter name when it's actually working.