Before I left for PA, I set my laptop up as an answering machine and it made me realize how many calls we get and how many get missed. So, I set up my linux box as a more permanent answering machine since it’s on more.
Setting up the modem was pretty easy since it’s a hardware modem. I had to recompile my kernel to get the serial modules. To use my modem, I use the following commands
modprobe 8250
modprobe serial_core
setserial /dev/ttyS0 uart 16550A port 0xd400 irq 9
I then installed the mgetty and mgetty-voice debs and configured them loosely around the information I found on this great Linux answering machine howto page.
To get vgetty to run, I added the following line to my /etc/inittab:
S0:23:respawn:/usr/sbin/vgetty ttyS0
I wanted to be able to access the messages remotely by dialing in, so I needed to edit my /etc/mgetty/voice.conf file and also I had to get the dtfm.sh and speakdate.sh from the source distribution and copy them to /var/spool/voice.sh. I had to record some of the messages listed in dtfm.sh and convert them to rmd files and copy them to /var/spool/voice/messages. Somethings still not right with speakdate.sh, but I don’t have time to work that out quite yet.
The mgetty/vgetty home page is here.