Hi Everyone
I will try and keep it sort, my friend and I both do our own homelabs the usual stuff Radarr, Pi-hole, TrueNas, Proxmox etc.
Now we want to do a bit of silly thing as the title says, regards to Fax’ing we just want to be able to do send faxs to eachother (memes, guides etc.) We both have a cisco SPA2102 VoIP which to our understanding should do the trick.
I have tried to find stuff on the internet to see if I could find a guide or some idea on how to do this in a modern internet method but without luck, so I was hoping to either get a bit of help or straight answer saying “Just use email man”
As someone working with both VoIP and Fax, all I can say is that both are horrible, and expect the worst from each when putting those 2 things together.
Since my work is a large org (they still use fax officially) I mostly work with enterprise software from Cisco, Oracle, etc. so I cannot help here in detail, start learning about SIP (abd RTP if you want to handle calls too) with FreePBX. There is a Fax plugin for FreePBX: https://github.com/FreePBX/fax but I could not find any documentation so far.
The world would be great if we started developing new digital solutions to analog problems instead of forcing the digital replacement to mimic its analog original
- me
Yea, how much do you know about SIP?
I ask because what I would do in this situation is run up a PBX, like FusionPBX, and get the ATA units to connect as an extension to allow calls between them.
No need for a sip trunk to a phone provider as you don’t care for external calls.
None, whatsoever but I can learn. I quickly found this opensource project https://www.freepbx.org which has a guide and installation script so maybe a good place to start.
My recommendation is to start with getting fax to work locally. As in, from port 1 of a single SPA2102 to port 2 of the same. This would validate that your fax machines and the SPA2102 is operational, and is just entertaining in its own right to have a dialtone that “calls” the other port.
Fortunately, Gravis from the Cathode Ray Dude YouTube channel has a writeup to do exactly that, and I’ve personally followed these steps on an SPA122 with success, although I was doing a silly phone project, not fax project. https://gekk.info/articles/ata-config.html
If you’re lucky, perhaps fax will Just Work because your machines are very permissive with the signals they receive and can negotiate. If not, you might have to adjust the “fax optimizations” discussed here: https://gekk.info/articles/ata-dialup.html
And then once local faxing works, you can then try connecting two VoIP devices together over the network. This can be as simple as direct SIP using IP and port number, or can involve setting up a PBX that both devices register against.