NAME¶
faxrunq - send fax jobs queued by
faxspool(1)
SYNOPSIS¶
faxrunq
DESCRIPTION¶
Run the fax queue set up by
faxspool(1), try to send all faxes, record result,
remove job and send notify mails.
faxrunq looks for all the jobs queued by
faxspool(1) to
/var/spool/fax/outgoing/*. For each job in the queue, faxrunq tries to send
it, using
sendfax(8).
If the send succeeds, the job is removed from the queue, and a
"success" mail is sent to the originator of the spooled job.
If the send fails, it's logged, and faxrunq proceeds to the next job. If the job
fails five times "fatally", that is, not with a locked or engaged
line, but with "NO CARRIER" (no fax machine, or line noise), the job
is suspended, and the requestor gets a mail, telling him so.
faxrunq can be run from the command line (but make sure the user doing
this has write access to the modem device and to the fax queue, that is,
usually this should be done by "uucp" or "root"). In a
production environment, it's more useful to start
faxrunq from
cron(8) in regular intervals, like "run it every 5 minutes".
See the
cron(8) and/or
crontab(1) man pages for this (which man
page exists depends on your system).
OPTIONS¶
- -q
- Tells faxrunq to be quiet, that is, suppress all status messages.
Error messages will still be printed.
FILES¶
- /var/spool/fax/outgoing/stop
- if this file exists, faxrunq (and faxrunqd) will do nothing. You
can use this to stop queue processing while testing something, or if you
know that the modem(s) are unavailable and do not want to run into oany
error messages, etc.
- /var/spool/fax/outgoing/faxqueue_done
- Every time faxrunq (or faxrunqd) run the fax queue, a time stamp is
written into that file. It is used by faxspool to display a warning
if the queue hasn't been run recently (so faxes may get stuck).
CONFIGURATION FILE¶
Some aspects of the behaviour of
faxrunq can be controlled by a
configuration file, /etc/mgetty/faxrunq.config. In this file, you can use the
following options:
- success-send-mail [y/n]
- A boolean parameter that controls whether a mail will be sent after
successful completition of the fax job.
- failure-send-mail [y/n]
- A boolean parameter that controls whether a mail will be sent after the
fax job has failed more than the maximum number of times.
- success-call-program <name>
- Here, you can specify a program that will be run when the fax has been
successfully sent. It will be passed two command line parameters. The
first is the full path to the fax JOB file (see faxq(5)), the second is
the last exit code from sendfax (for success-call-program, this is
always "0").
- failure-call-program <name>
- Similar to the "success-call-program", this program will be run
when the fax has been failed too often and faxrunq gives up. This
script could, for example, print out the fax on a printer so that it can
be sent manually on a paper fax machine.
- maxfail-costly <n>
- This specifies the number of times that a fax may fail
"fatally", that is, causing telephone costs (explained above).
The default value is 5.
- maxfail-total <m>
- This is the absolute maximum number of times that faxrunq will try
to send any given fax. The default value is 10. (Right now, it's not yet
implemented).
- delete-sent-jobs [y/n]
- Determines whether faxrunq should delete jobs after sending, or
leave them in the fax queue (while moving the "JOB" file to
"JOB.done") so that they can be seen at by "faxq -o".
The default value is "do not delete sent faxes".
- acct-log <path>
- Specifies where faxrunq should protocol success and failure of each
try to send a fax job. The default location is
/var/spool/fax/outgoing/acct.log.
There are some other options that are allowed, but ignored. These are:
max-modems, and faxrunqd-log.
They are used by faxrunqd(8) (which reads the same config file, but has more
options).
BUGS¶
faxrunq doesn't handle proper time scheduling yet
Don't use
faxrunq if you have malevolent users with access to the fax
spool. It doesn't handle all cases of file movement tricks correctly. Use
faxrunqd(8) instead, which does it correctly (this point is mostly moot
if the fax queue is set up correctly - that is, owned by 'uucp', mode 755, and
faxrunq(1) is also run as user 'uucp').
SEE ALSO¶
faxspool(1),
sendfax(8),
faxq(1),
faxqueue(5),
faxrunqd(8)
AUTHOR¶
faxrunq is Copyright (C) 1993-2002 by Gert Doering,
<gert@greenie.muc.de>.