[NCLUG] linux-based "LanFax" server for an HP scanner

[Gabriel L. Somlo]

I recently bought an HP Scanjet 8500 (networked scanner), whose main
purpose will be to email scanned jobs to various users.

The device it's replacing had a hardware modem and could act as a
straightforward fax machine, and every once in a while that
functionality comes in really handy (and supporting it is "cheaper"
than telling everyone that faxes are obsolete and why don't they
just email PDFs to people, etc).

The Scanjet 8500 does NOT have a built-in modem, and supports sending
faxes only via "Lan Fax" or "Internet Fax". The former writes TIF and
metadata files to a Samba share, and the latter assumes an
internet-to-fax gateway.

I've made it as far as setting up Samba on a linux box, and having
the scanner (via its LanFax setup menu) drop pairs of
(FOO.tif, FOO.hpf) files into the share each time I try to "send" a
fax. The .hpf file contains metadata (such as the phone number(s) to
which to fax the .tif file).

The entire process is described on pages 31-33 of this document:

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c00433124/c00433124.pdf

I'm imagining it should be trivial from here on in to set up e.g.
incron to fire up a hylafax job each time a new (.tif, .hpf) pair is
dropped into the samba share by the scanner, and actually get the
faxes delivered.

The part that's killing me right now is "notification". According to
the document above, the "Lan Fax" server may drop "notification files"
into the samba share, with the same base name as the .tif/.hpf pair,
and with extensions .001, .002, ..., .00n for the first, second, and
n-th phone/fax number listed in the .hpf.

If the user sending the fax requested "notification" and entered an
email address, the scanner will interpret the .00x notification files
and email a status report (success, error, etc) to the user.

I can't find any documentation on what the expected file format is
for the notification files. Even more fun, if I guess "wrong", or
create an empty notification file (e.g. 'touch FOO.001'), the scanner
crashes and reboots (with a lengthy self-check that reminds me of
hour-long fsck runs from the days of linux 2.2.X :)

So I'm wondering if anyone on this list knows anything (or anyONE
who might know anything) about HPs "lanfax notification file" format.

Thanks in advance for any clues !

--Gabriel