23.2. Configuring Your System as an Answering Machine
Assuming you have a modem attached to a serial port on your system and plugged into a phone line, and that it supports voice recording and playback, you can set up your system as an answering machine by following these steps:
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2. | Click on the Add a new serial port link, which will bring up the port configuration form shown in Figure 23.1. Figure 23.1. The serial port configuration form.
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3. | Set the Serial device to the port to which your modem or null-modem cable is connected. Serial port 1 corresponds to the device file /dev/ttyS0, and so on. For modems on serial devices not starting with /dev/ttyS (such as USB modems), select the Other device option and enter the full device file path into the text field next to the menu. |
4. | If the Rings before answering field is visible, you can deselect Global default and enter the number of rings that your system will wait for before answering a call. This applies only to the modem on this serial port, however. If the field is not visible, or you want to use the same setting on all modems, you can set the number of rings in Step 6, instead. |
5. | If the Answer mode field is visible, just leave it set to Global default. |
6. | Click the Create button at the bottom of the page to return to the list of serial ports. |
7. | Return to the module's main page and click on the Voicemail Server Options icon. This will take you to the form shown in Figure 23.2. Figure 23.2. The voicemail server options form.
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8. | Enter the number of rings that the server should wait for before picking up a call into the Rings before answering field, unless it was already set in Step 2. If you have multiple modems and want to set a different number of rings for each of them, check the Can be set for each serial port box. |
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10. | To limit the length of a message than can be left on your system, change the Maximum message length field. Entering too high a number could cause all of your disk space to be consumed by extremely long messages. |
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13. | To set the volume levels for recorded messages and for greeting messages played by the modem, set the Recording volume level and Playback volume level fields, respectively. Both can be set to either Default or to a volume percentage. Not all modems, however, support playback and recording volume configuration. |
14. | To have newly recorded messages emailed to you, change the After recording message field to Email in WAV format to, and enter your address into the field next to it. You can also select Run command on message file and enter the path to a program into its field. Whenever a message is recorded, the program will be run with the message file in RMD format as its first command-line argument. |
15. | Click the Save button to record your new configuration settings and return to the module's main page. |
16. | Click the Apply Configuration button to tell vgetty and init to use the new configuration. You can now try calling your phone number to test and see if the call is answered and a message recorded. Because no greeting message has been set yet, you will only hear a beep when the system is ready to record. |
There are several things that can go wrong that cannot be detected until vgetty tries to communicate with your modem and answer a call. Fortunately, detailed logs are written to the file /var/log/vgetty.ttyname so that you can see what is going wrong. If your modem is on the first serial port, the log file will be /var/log/vgetty.ttyS0. Log in as root and use the tail –f command on it to monitor it when a call comes in, so you can see what is happening.
If your modem does not support voice playback and recording, an appropriate error message will be written to the log as soon as the Apply Configuration button is clicked. If this happens, there is nothing you can do apart from buying a new modem. Another common problem is a failure to play the greeting message, due to the same rate or compression format not being supported by your modem. See Section 23.4 “Setting a Greeting Message” for details on how to resolve this.