Re: flexfax: Hylafax future (*not* on NT, please!)

[Shuvam Misra <shuvam@spacenetindia.com>]

| 	I feel, that the solution with samba may be work, but its not a
| very clean, nice solution. Why you may ask. I don't feel very comfortable
| with ps documents travelling in the network with the intention to send
| them as a fax without having an faxnumber attached to them. The risk to
| produce a mess with them is waiting in the corner.
| 
| 	This approach may work without any problem with one User sending
| one or maybe ten faxes per day. If you have 50 Users a 10 Faxes per day
| you may get problems.

I am somehow not sure this is really a serious matter. When we examine
the route taken by one fax message from a PC via Samba to Hylafax, we
find that a new process is fired on the Unix end to handle each new
connection. Therefore, there's really very little programming
complexity. Each printer handler process on the Samba server side just
handles one connection, connects to the Respond program on one PC, gets
the destination fax number, pushes the job out to Hylafax, and
terminates. There is absolutely no congestion or complexity till this
point.

There might be a hundred users on a hundred different PCs, but each user
will only send one fax out from his PC at a time. This is because the
PC software behaviour is essentially interactive. You don't have daemons
running on a Windows PC sending out faxes in parallel, in the background,
without the user's knowledge. Therefore, the user, who is essentially in
single-tasking mode, will send one fax, get one popup dialog box, enter
one fax number, and hit "OK". I don't see any cause for confusion at all.

The real parallelism and big-queue management is all happening within
Hylafax. And there are testimonials that Hylafax can handle thousands of
faxes going out per day. I don't think your figures of 50 users at 10
faxes will stress this system at all.

If you think this scenario of one Samba+Hylafax server handling hundreds
of incoming faxes is complex, then imagine how a proxy Webserver handles
thousands of outgoing requests from different PCs, to different Websites,
using different protocols, all in parallel. As long as one process is
handling just one connection, the Unix style of operation can take it.

Just my two bits.

Regards,
Shuvam