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Date:      Sat, 29 Apr 2000 18:13:48 -0700
From:      Andy Sparrow <andy@geek4food.org>
To:        Paul Chvostek <paul@it.ca>
Cc:        Ade Lovett <ade@FreeBSD.ORG>, ports@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: comms/hylafax 
Message-ID:  <200004300113.SAA59876@mega.geek4food.org>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sat, 29 Apr 2000 17:08:35 EDT." <20000429170835.A56297@flarn.it.ca> 

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Your message dated: Sat, 29 Apr 2000 17:08:35 EDT
>
>One eensy weensy security hole, and you want to drop the package.  ;-)
>
>Personally, I think Hylafax is great.  In the environment in which I
>use it, it's secure enough for me.  (My FAX machine doesn't do anything
>but answer FAXes.)

I agree. My fax server is behind a firewall in any case.

>And despite the "BROKEN" marker, it's still the only full-featured
>enterprise FAX software in the ports collection.

I like it a lot, been very happy with it for a number of years.

One of those 'configure it, forget it' sort of apps. I /like/ that
attribute in software :-)

>If the authors are really MIA, then perhaps some attention should
>be given to http://www.hylafax.org/.  I haven't looked in too much
>depth, but somebody's at home there; the FAQ was last updated April
>12th 2000, and there's regular traffic on the flexfax mailing lists.

Yes, 312 messages so far this month. 

In particular, Hylafax 4.1 beta2 is being readied for release.

Bug fixes and patches are being produced, seems to be active.

>I'm away for the next two weeks, but if nobody else hoists the flag,
>I'd be happy to try on the hat of maintainer and collect patches
>after I return.  I think Hylafax should remain in the ports
>collection, even in its BROKEN state, until there's something that
>does its job better.

Note that as it stands right now, Hylafax is broken with the current 
libtiff 3.5 (as I discovered when I decided to upgrade/rebuild all my 
ports on 3.4-STABLE recently). Hylafax mysteriously stopped working.

:-(

Everything built fine, but it failed to send or receive faxes (infinite
CPU-bound loop, ~8-byte faxes received).

Solution (for me) was to revert to libtiff3.4 (the libtiff maintainers
changed the interfaces). This didn't break either Ghostscript 5.50 or
apsfilter (and friends) on the same machine.

There is a patch for the current version of Hylafax to convert to use the 
latest interfaces (think they're 64 bit now or something).

>If you're looking for contact via email, check out the mailing lists at
>http://www.hylafax.org/mailing-lists.html.  Sam Lefler may not be as
>visible these days, but there *is* still a user base of unix people
>who don't want to buckle and use Windows NT with commercial software
>for enterprise FAX service.
>
>
>On Fri, Apr 28, 2000 at 01:01:34PM -0500, Ade Lovett wrote:
>> 
>> On Fri, Apr 28, 2000 at 01:52:12PM -0400, T.E.Dickey wrote:
>> > > comms/hylafax has been marked FORBIDDEN with security holes for 
>> > > quite some time now.  There are also a few ports PRs open relating 
>> > > to it.

Sorry, I can only find two open (searching for 'hylafax' in multi-line text 
fields), could you please provide a better search criteria so I can take a 
look at these?

In particular, where can I find information regarding the security issue(s)
that caused it to get marked FORBIDDEN in the first place?

>> > > Since neither the authors, nor anyone on the ports list 
>> > > appears to be concerned about it enough to fix it, I am proposing 
>> > > that one week from today (5th May 2000) 

Hmm, I only subscribed to '-ports' yesterday, and missed your original message 
(thought I'd be lurking for a bit longer - o well).

As I actually use it myself, I'd be interested in looking at it. I
was going to look at the latest Beta anyway...


Cheers,

AS



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