Get status of fax machine

Any help is greatly appreciated!!!

BACKGROUND: We have a system called MCI Neverbusy Fax that is suppose to be a 24/7 fax line that is never busy (hence the name :smiley: ) It has gone down twice this week alone and I have no way of knowing if it is up or down until I get calls to the tune of “Did you get my fax?”

I am trying to create a script to dial a fax number periodically (twice an hour) and check if the fax machine picks up. If it does GREAT! If not (if it rings busy or never answers), I would like a dialog box to pop up and also have my mac shoot me an email letting me know that the fax is down in case I am away from my desk. FYI: I am running Panther.

I really appreciate any guidance you all can provide. It would make my life so much easier if I didn’t have to call our fax number to figure when it was up or down.
Thanks!!!
-slipnslide

I don’t know of any product you can buy off the shelf to do this, but it wouldn’t surprise me if one existed. You could ask product support for your fax server how they would approach the problem.

I once had a fax server that went on the fritz a lot so we got the phone company to do call forwarding on the fax server’s phone number to send calls to another line after 6 rings. Then we plugged a plain old fax machine into the second line. That way, when the fax server stopped answering, the faxes still printed out. Problem solved.

If that’s not an option for you and you’re not an experienced coder, this project is not a great place to start. (Communications programming can be hard.) If you really want to do this, here are a few ideas…

If you know some hayes protocol (e.g. you know what ‘atdt’ means) you could shell script commands to etc/tty.modem to dial the fax and then see how it responds.

If you want an applescript solution, you will need a scriptable app with commands to dial a number and then hang up. For example,

tell application “Internet Connect”
connect to telephone number xxxxxxx
disconnect
end tell

I don’t see anything in the Internet Connect dictionary that explains how it responds if it can’t connect. Maybe there won’t be any status record? Disconnect the phone line to your fax machine and try the Internet Connect script to see what happens.

If IC won’t do it, check out

http://www.macronsoft.com/pages/en/abdialer.html

or the most excellent…

http://homepage.mac.com/jonn8/jpt/

both are cheap and fun to have and probably have some means of telling you if the call goes through. Download them and check their dictionaries.

Good luck with it. Post your code if you get anywhere with it.

Can you get the internet status (connected/disconnected) without launching “Internet Connect”?