Voice/Fax Modem Advice

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A have a PCIe modem (Conexant ChipSet, PCI id = 14f1:2f83. It interfaces to my land-line (POTS) telephone line in the United States. On Windows, I had a good answering machine package
(Ventafax) that reported CallerID, recorded messages, sent/received fax, and had a scripting language that let me say “To leave a message for Alice, press 1; to leave a message for Bob, press 2”, etc.

I’m trying to move this function to a CentOS-based system without going to the expense or complexity of Asterisk (expense because of specialized telephony cards).

My research found a driver (at www.linuxant.com), but it required that I recompile the driver. I got absolutely lost trying to follow the directions which seemed to be steering me towards a custom Kernel.

So, my question to the group wisdom is:

– Is there any hope in trying to find a suitable driver for this device without building a custom kernel? And if a custom “module” is needed, I might need help compiling it.

– Is there a inexpensive modem that CentOS 7 supports with the needed functions? and maybe some software applications that might help?

10 thoughts on - Voice/Fax Modem Advice

  • I know this is not the answer you are looking for but the standalone ATA’s are not very expensive and there is http://nerdvittles.com/ to help you get going. This guy gives you various CentOS, Debian, raspberry pi based iso’s and other cookbooks to easily build your own PBX. The good news is most of it
    “just works” as long as you understand the terminology.

    I have had good luck with the Obihai 202 ATA. Never could get good call quality from the grandstream stuff but maybe that is just me.

    HTH,

  • Jose Maria Terry Jimenez wrote:

    A SPA122 ATA from Cisco might be useful as a gateway, they are cheap. You´d be using it kinda in reverse, but I don´t see why that shouldn´t be possible.

    Other than that, specialized cards have come down in prices, probably because ppl aren´t using them anymore. You might also want to look into Patton gateways, but they tend to be rather pricy and are a hell to set up unless you´re familiar with all the phone-related stuff.

    If your internet connection is decent, it might be a good idea to give up the POTS line and use a VOIP provider instead, with a asterisk connected to it. It would be the easiest way by far.

    Asterisk isn´t too complicated for getting basic phone services to work on which you can expand over time; you only need to overcome the few first steps. Since a CentOS package for asterisk is missing, you may want to compile it yourself, which is easy. However, I had to disable one of the drivers/features of asterisk in the build config because there´s a bug that makes asterisk fail when that feature/driver is enabled — I left everything else enabled and don´t know what most of the stuff is …

    There´s probably no way around asterisk anyway. For fax, if you really need that, there is, since ages, hylafax, which apparently can be somehow made to work with asterisk. Fax has always been, and still is, a PITA. Fax doesn´t make any sense since decades; it´s way easier and far more reliable to send emails instead.

    If you pick a VOIP provider, they might have a fax service which you could use instead of trying to figure it out.

  • At 10:20 AM 10/4/2017, you wrote:

    Interesting reference, but I see nothing that talks about using my POTS (plain old telephone service) from the local phone company as where my phone activity is. I do NOT use VOIP, SIP, nor a bunch of other acronyms.

    David

  • An ATA with an FXO port will connect to your analog telephone service.

    —
    ========================================================================
    Ian Pilcher arequipeno@gmail.com
    ——– “I grew up before Mark Zuckerberg invented friendship” ——–
    ========================================================================

  • El 4/10/17 a las 22:18, david escribió:

    This device has 1 FXO and 1 FXS port, you can connect 1 POTS and 1
    Analog phone to it, they are “converted” to SIP and then you can manage that from Asterisk. The same that an analog card but instead connect to a computer slot, goes by Ethernet and cheaper (instead a DAHDI channel use a SIP channel).

  • me@tdiehl.org wrote:

    I´m not sure what you´re trying to say; I neither have a facebook account, nor a cell phone, and I don´t understand why cell phones aren´t VOIP clients that can simply be used with asterisk.

  • I do not have a facebook account either. The first link above is simply a link to Ward Mundy’s semi weekly articles. If you scroll down the page you can pick the articles that interest you. I ignore anything having to do with facebook or self driving cars, etc.. Ward writes about many technical things but tends to specialize in all things related to telephony.

    The 2nd link allows you to pick out the type of pbx that interests you and then points you to links to his articles that instruct you how to download and build your choice of pbx. You just have to be care not to click on the stupid ads.

    For instance http://nerdvittles.com/?p208 takes you to his article to build
    “Introducing Incredible PBX 13 for CentOS 6 and 7”

    HTH,