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Seeking help for a silly FAX project (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 1 month ago by Lord_Mac@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/homelab@lemmy.ml

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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"

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[–] litchralee@sh.itjust.works 2 points 4 weeks ago

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.