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This article will walk you through setting up faxing on a voice line within Elastix PBX.

The first thing that you will want to do is create a IAX2 extension. After that is done go to your Fax tab and select New Virtual Fax. The extension and secret should be the same of the IAX2 extension that you created. Fill in the rest of the required fields.

Once that is done go to General Settings and set the fax extension to the IAX2 extension that you created. Enter the email addresses here as well. Next go to your inbound route and for Fax Extension select FreePBX default, for Fax Detection Type select NVFax, and for Pause After Answer enter 5.

It is almost setup, but we still need to install NVFax.

You can download the files here:

http://www.elastix.org/images/fbfiles/files/NV_Apps_elastix_0-f1b156f398276beb9feb5856e88edc88.zip

The instructions are in the archive, but basically you are just going to SCP three .so files over to your Elastix box. Once that is done you should be able to receive faxes. Check the Fax Visor under the Fax tab because the email notification won’t work unless you set that up before now. For instructions on setting up email please refer to the Elastix without Tears guide section 20.1 ENABLING EMAIL NOTIFICATION OF VOICEMAIL. If you don’t want the daily usage reports to be sent to you then you will need to edit the cronjob. Open /etc/cron.daily/hylafax in Vi or Nano. You need to comment out the section where the output of faxcron gets mailed.

Change this:
-tmp 7 | mail -s "HylaFAX Usage Report" faxmaster
To This:
-tmp 7 # | mail -s "HylaFAX Usage Report" faxmaster

The script will still run to delete the old and temporary data, but it will no longer mail the reports to you.

Sending faxes is done using either JHylaFAX or Winprint Hylafax. Both applications have enough documentation to get them connected to Elastix so I won’t go into detail. I use Winprint Hylafax and the only thing it requires is the Elastix IP, extension, and secret.