Incomming Faxes -- Is There a Way to React to Different Ringtone?

Question

I have only used my fax setup to send faxes because I didn't have a second line and didn't want to get into messing with our home phone and voicemail.
But ... as part of our phone package we have a second number on the same line that rings with a different pattern -- two short instead of the normal ring.
Is there a way to tell the computer to answer as a fax machine if the broken ring calls but leave normal calls alone?
Or any other simple solution so we can receive inbound faxes?
Thanks

Answer 1

Yes there is, but you have to get your hands dirty in Terminal.app to do it. It's really easy though. In Tiger, log into an administratively privileged user account. Launch Terminal.app (in the /Applications/Utilities folder). First off, make a backup of the original file that you are going to edit. Type:
sudo cp -pv /usr/bin/fax /usr/bin/fax.original 
and press the return key. Enter your admin password. It will not be echoed back to you as you type it. Hit return key when finished.
Next, launch the "pico" text editor. Pico is a simple command-line text editor, very similar to the old DOS Edit program if you're old enough to remember that. So type:
sudo pico /usr/bin/fax 
You are looking for a line that reads,
INIT="-iZ -i&FE0&D2S7=120" 
at least that's how it reads in the Leopard version. I think the Tiger version had an extra parameter on that line, so that it read,
INIT="-iZ -i&FE0&D2S7=120 -i&C0" 
At any rate, the line you are looking for is going to be very close to one of these two lines. You use the arrow keys to manuever around in the file, and you can also use control-v to page down and control-y to page up, as is shown in the bottom of the pico window.
You need to edit that line to read as,
INIT="-iZ -i&FE0&D2S7=120 -i&C0-SDR=2" 
That "-SDR=2" sets the distinctive ring pattern for the fax to only answer on the second ring pattern, not the first.
Now do a control-x (^X) to exit the pico application, answer the "save modified buffer" question with "y" (for yes), and depress the return key to save (overwrite) the original filename. You may have to reboot to make the change to become effective. I don't know for sure, I always did just for grins and chuckles.
It is not likely that there ever will be any more Tiger updates to 10.4.12 and beyond, but if there were, my experience had been that said updates blew away the modified /usr/bin/fax. So you may want to keep a backup lying around. If you do, then type:
sudo cp -pv /usr/bin/fax /usr/bin/fax.distinctiveRing 
If you type:
ls -l /usr/bin/fax* 
you will see all three of these files in the /usr/bin directory.
You're finally finished, so ⌘q Terminal, and, like I said, reboot your computer just to be sure the modifications take hold.
I have been successfully running this setup for years, first with Tiger and then with Leopard, on my 2001 Quicksilver G4 computer. I set up fax preferences to answer after the second ring (gave me adequate time for me to recognize an incoming call as ringing in on the fax number so I wouldn't rush to the phone to answer it), and it coexists nicely with my PhoneValet 5.4.2 (voice mail and call logging) that rolls to voice mail after (user-configurable in PhoneValet) seven rings on the primary number.
I should caveat all of this by saying that I am assuming that your computer has a built-in modem and not something dangling off the back of your computer via USB cable or something. Long ago, a person posted that they were having issues with doing the above stuff that I have described with what I recall to be an external modem and Tiger OS. He was able to work around it by making several edits to that same /usr/bin/fax file but they were way different than the edits that I describe above, and he had to play around with finding the correct numeric values for some of the parameters that he was editing. But he did get it to work.