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Things are meant to be simple right?

I had an outstanding issue with a client who purchased a rather nice proprietary VOIP system. Problem was that the inbuilt faxing system would only allow them to see the faxes online with their machines. Handy for sending faxes around the office and to off-site workers, but not very easy for the poor lady who’s job is to ensure hard copy’s are kept stored.

With the proprietary vendor saying that it simply ‘wasn’t possible’ I went back to the drawing board… here is what crazy scheme I cooked up.

1. Incoming Fax received by VOIP fax server
2. Fax server tells Client PC that it’s got a fax, ready to be viewed on machine
3. Using Proprietary’s inbuilt filters, all incoming Faxes to the user will be automagically send an attached TIFF file via e-mail.
4. E-mail is sent via local Linux (soapbox) server and caught by Postfix’s alias automation
5. Email is piped to a PHP script (tried ruby, but got pissed off by ActionMailer’s reliance on Rails too much and went with good ol’ PEAR MailMimeDecoder) which decodes the E-mail and extracts the TIFF image.
6. TIFF image is converted to a multi-page PostScript file with tiff2ps
7. The newly created PostScript file is then whisked away to a CUPS Que.
8. CUPS then sends off it’s job to a Netgear print server which passes it’s data on to the Brother printer
9. Brother multifunction printer prints out the fax AND uses yellow paper to boot

Surprisingly it’s been working fine for a while now and I think I need to work in some duct tape and bubblegum in there somewhere to make the process… complete.