First, let's start with a short introduction what CapiSuite actually is and how it works. After that, the configuration and startup of CapiSuite will be explained in short.
CapiSuite is a daemon (program which runs in the background) whos main task is to sit around and wait until a call is incoming. If this happens it will start a special Python script - the incoming script - and do what this script tells it, for example record a voice call to implement an answering machine.
To also be able to issue outgoing calls, another script is called at regular intervals - the idle script. It can check any resource to get instructions for placing a call - one can for example imagine to check a special mail account or watch a special directory where tasks are placed by the user.
So all user-visible actions and the behaviour of CapiSuite are defined in these two scripts.
You'll need to do two things now:
provide scripts by either
using and configuring the default scripts distributed with CapiSuite or
writing your own scripts (perhaps by using the default ones as templates)
configure CapiSuite itself and tell it where to find the two scripts
This page concentrates on the general configuration of CapiSuite - that consists mainly of options telling it which scripts to use and where and how to log its activities. After that, some details about starting CapiSuite are described.
The next pages will then introduce the standard scripts you already installed along with CapiSuite and tell you how to use the answering maching and fax functions provided by them.
The details on how to write your own scripts are covered in another part of the documentation (Chapter 2, Users Guide).
CapiSuite uses a general configuration file for the core functions. This file should be located in /etc/capisuite/capisuite.conf or /usr/local/etc/capisuite/capisuite.conf depending on how you installed CapiSuite.
Most options are set to reasonable defaults already for using the standard scripts - so if you want you can also skip this section and read on in Section , “Startup of CapiSuite”
The options will be presented in brief here - for further details please refer to the comments in the configuration file itself.
Options available in capisuite.conf
This option tells CapiSuite which script should be executed at incoming calls. Only change this if you want to use your own script.
This option reflects the path and name of the idle script. This script is called in regular intervalls to check if any outgoing call should be done. As above, the default should be ok if you don't use your own script.
Here you can define how often the idle script should be executed. The number given is the interval between subsequent invocations in seconds. Lesser numbers give you quicker response to queued jobs but also a higher system load. The default should be ok in most cases.
This file will be used for all "normal" messages printed by CapiSuite telling you what it does. Error messages are written to a special log (see below).
You can define how detailled the log output of CapiSuite will be. The default will give you some informational messages for each incoming and outgoing call and should be enough for normal use. I would recommend to only increase it if you encounter some problems. Logs of higher level are mainly intended for developers, so just use them if you want to report a problem or have some know-how of the CAPI interface and the internals of CapiSuite.
All errors which CapiSuite detects internally and in your scripts will end up here. They are written to an extra file so that they don't get lost in the normal log. Please check this log regularly for any messages - especially when you encounter problems. Please report all messages you don't understand and which aren't caused by your own script-modifications to the CapiSuite team.
As CapiSuite is a daemon, it is normally activated during the system startup process. Just add a call to
/path/to/capisuite -d
in your startup scripts. In LSB conforming Linux distributions, you'll find the startup scripts in /etc/init.d. For detailled documentation how to add a service there please refer to the documentation of your distribution. There's an example startup script written for SuSE Linux included in the source distribution (see rc.capisuite) which should (hopefully) work with other LSB compliant distributions, too. If you need to modify it, I'll welcome your feedback and happily add instructions for other distributions here.
If you use the right RPM packages of CapiSuite, the necessary scripts should already be included. For activating them, please use your distributors config tool. If you use the RPM distributed with SuSE Linux and want to stay with the default scripts, everything should work "out of the box". As soon as you have configured the default scripts, simply run rccapisuite restart.
For debug purposes, you can also start CapiSuite manually at any time by just calling
/path/to/capisuite
There are also some other commandline options available:
commandline options of CapiSuite
show a short summary of commandline options
use a custom configuration file instead of /etc/capisuite/capisuite.conf or /usr/local/etc/capisuite/capisuite.conf.
run as daemon (used in your startup script, see above)
CapiSuite can run as any user you want theoretically. It only needs read/write permissions to /dev/capi20. If you use the default scripts, however, CapiSuite must run as root.