Month: December 2014

How to receive incoming faxes in the FreePBX Distro for free, without spending $150

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This article is a guest post. We may not be able to answer questions about this article.

Here is how to receive incoming faxes in the FreePBX Distro without spending $150 on their FaxPro module (which IMHO is severely overpriced, given that several other distros offer a comparable faxing solution for free, including Elastix and Incredible PBX, though I do not necessarily recommend either of those distributions for various reasons). It may be possible to do outbound faxing by installing Hylafax+ and AvantFax. (EDIT: If you read Russian, you could try following the instructions in this article – hint: Google Translate is your friend – but please do a full backup of your system first and be careful, because installing AvantFax in particular may overwrite a portion of your FreePBX GUI!).

If you only have the need to send an occasional outgoing fax, you can use FaxZero, which allows you to send up to three free faxes a day, with up to three pages in each fax. But, here is how you can easily receive incoming faxes in the FreePBX Distro.

First, create a new Virtual Extension:

Create Virtual ExtensionClick Submit.  When the next page appears, give the virtual extension a name and an extension number:

Virtual FAX Extension Settings 1Now you must Submit the page and reload it, otherwise the fax settings will not appear. Now on that same page, fill in the fax settings. The Fax Email is the email address at which you wish to receive your faxes. I suggest using a PDF file as the output format:

Virtual FAX Extension Settings 2Now Submit the page again.

EDIT FOR FREEPBX 14 AND NEWER VERSION USERS: The above is only partially correct for FreePBX 14.  In that version, you must have the User Management module installed.  Start out by creating a new Virtual Extension as shown above.  Under the General tab, enter the User Extension and the Display Name, and make sure that in the User Manager Settings, Link to a Default User is set to Create New User.  Under the Advanced tab, set Call Waiting to Disable. Click Submit.  Go to User Management (under the Admin menu) and under Users find the newly created FAX user and click the edit button. Click the FAX tab and set Enabled to Yes, and Attachment Format to whatever you want (I suggest PDF).  Then click the User Details tab and fill in the Email Address, and click Submit.  Now continue on with the instructions below.

Next, create an Inbound Route using your FAX number as the DID Number. This can be any number coming into your system that is dedicated to FAX usage. In my experience, even a Google Voice number will work fine for this purpose most of the time. Do NOT set “Detect Faxes” to YES unless for some reason you want to use a single DID for both voice and FAX. If you can get a separate free DID just for receiving faxes, that’s far better than sharing a DID for both purposes. Instead, at the bottom of the page under “Set Destination”, select “Fax Recipient” from the dropdown and then the FAX extension you created:

Set Fax RecipientSubmit that page.  Finally, you need to set an outgoing email address.  Go to Settings and select Fax Configuration, then on the Fax Options page, fill in an Outgoing Email address (sender address) for faxes sent by your system. After doing that, go to the bottom of the page and click Submit, and only then should you go up and click the bright red Apply Config button.  Don’t forget to Submit all your pages after making any changes or you’ll need to do them over!

Set outgoing fax email addressNow you can have someone try sending you a test fax. They should send it to your DID and the call should be answered with FAX tones and after the fax is completed, it should automatically be sent to your specified email address (the one you chose when setting up the virtual extension) as a PDF attachment. If it doesn’t arrive in a reasonable time, check your spam or trash folders. Some email providers (Google, I am looking at you) seem to think that any incoming fax is a spam message. You may need to tell your email provider that such messages are “not spam”, or add the email address of your system as an “approved sender” or something like that. If you don’t find the fax in either your inbox, or your spam or trash mailboxes, it may be that your system is not properly configured to send email. That is another topic entirely and is beyond the scope of this article.

Note that the above has been tested on a recent version of the FreePBX Distro, but your experience may vary depending, on which version of the Distro you are using.

Link: Use VnStat to Monitor Network Traffic from Linux Command Line

Network traffic monitoring not only helps administrators detect root causes of traffic related issues, like network overloading, but also helps them keep a tab on traffic flow to and from the Internet. Overall, it’s an important task that requires a dedicated and an effective software.

For Linux, there are many GUI-based network traffic monitoring tools, but if you are looking for a command line-based utility, vnstat is worth trying out. In this article, we will discuss the basics of the command along with the features it provides.

Full article here:
Use VnStat to Monitor Network Traffic from Linux Command Line (Make Tech Easier)

Link: U-Boot and Linux Source Code for ODROID-C1 Board Has Been Released

Hardkernel ODROID-C1 board, a more powerful $35 alternative to the Raspberry Pi, garnered a lot of attention when it was announced last week. At the time source code was not available, but as scheduled, U-boot and Linux source code is now available, and the full Android SDL should be released on February 2015. Instructions to get the code, and build both Linux and U-boot are available on ODROID-C1 Wiki, and I’ve just given a try to Linux instructions myself to see if I would encounter any issues in Ubuntu 14.04.

Full article here:
U-Boot and Linux Source Code for ODROID-C1 Board Has Been Released (CNXSoft – Embedded Software Development)

Link: How to block unwanted IP addresses on Linux efficiently

You may want to block IP addresses on your Linux box under various circumstances. For example, as an end user you may want to protect yourself from known spyware or tracker IP addresses. Or when you are running P2P software, you may want to filter out connections from networks associated with anti-P2P activity. If you are a sysadmin, you may want to ban access from spam IP addresses to your production mail server. Or you may wish to block web server access from certain countries for some reason. In many cases, however, your IP address block list can grow quickly to tens of thousands of IP addresses or IP address blocks. How can you deal with it?

Full article here:
How to block unwanted IP addresses on Linux efficiently (Xmodulo)

Link: How To Add Launchpad PPAs In Debian Via `add-apt-repository` Command

“add-apt-repository” is an Ubuntu-specific script to add or remove repositories which, among others, automatically imports the public GPG key. For more information, see its man page.

You can use “add-apt-repository” in Debian to add Launchpad PPAs however, there are a few things that you should know. Read on to find out how to use “add-apt-repository” in Debian.

Full article here:
How To Add Launchpad PPAs In Debian Via `add-apt-repository` Command (Web Upd8)

Link: How to Check the Progress of Running Commands in Linux

Sometimes, while copying a large file, like a movie or an operating system image, the cp command takes longer than expected based on the load on your system. Since it doesn’t tell the progress of the operation, it gets difficult to understand what exactly is happening.

In scenarios like these, a command like cv could be of great help, as it not only lets you know the progress of the operation, but is also capable of displaying the remaining time. In this article, we will discuss the command along with some useful examples.

Full article here:
How to Check the Progress of Running Commands in Linux (Make Tech Easier)

Link: Spider a Website with Wget – 20 Practical Examples

How do I download an entire website for offline viewing? How do I save all the MP3s from a website to a folder on my computer? How do I download files that are behind a login page? How do I build a mini-version of Google?

Wget is a free command line program – available for Mac, Windows and Linux (included) – that can help you accomplish all this and more. What makes it different from most download managers is that wget can follow the HTML links on a web page and recursively download the files.

Full article here:
Spider a Website with Wget – 20 Practical Examples (Digital Inspiration)

Link: Working with Arrays in Linux Shell Scripting – Part 8

We cannot imagine a programming language without the concept of arrays. It doesn’t matter how they are implemented among various languages. Instead arrays help us in consolidating data, similar or different, under one symbolic name.

Here as we are concerned about shell scripting, this article will help you in playing around with some shell scripts which make use of this concept of arrays.

Full article here:
Working with Arrays in Linux Shell Scripting – Part 8 (Tecmint)

Link: ODROID-C1 is a $35 quad-core, single-board Android/Linux PC

When the Raspberry Pi team launched a tiny, low power computer priced at just $35, it was pretty remarkable. But that was 2 years ago, and while the Raspberry Pi has seen a few updates in that time, it’s still powered by the same single-core 700 MHz Broadcomm BCM2835 ARM11 processor.

Over the past few years a number of other single-board computers with more powerful hardware have appeared, but they usually also have higher price tags.

Hardkernel’s ODROID-C1 doesn’t though… it’s a quad-core mini computer that sells for just $35.

odroid-c1_01

Full article and demonstration videos here:
ODROID-C1 is a $35 quad-core, single-board Android/Linux PC (Liliputing)
Related:
$35 quad-core hacker SBC offers Raspberry Pi-like size and I/O (LinuxGizmos.com)
Ordroid-C1 vs Raspberry Pi B+: Hardware, Benchmark, Storage and Ethernet Performance Comparison tables from Ordroid

Link: cpio command – copies, lists & extracts files to and from archives

Linux/UNIX cpio (copy in/out) command copies, lists, and extracts files to and from a single file or archives. Some of the options available with cpio command are listed in the below table . The cpio command requires that one of the o, i, or p options must be specified.

Full article here:
cpio command – copies, lists & extracts files to and from archives (NextStep4it)

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