flexfax: Large number of errors with Hylafax and ZyXEL Omni modem

[Shuvam Misra <shuvam@spacenetindia.com>]

This is in continuation to earlier mails from myself and others on this
topic. I'm running a TPC cell using Linux, Hylafax 4.0pl2, and a ZyXEL
Omni O288S, as mentioned before. This is the statistical count of the
Hylafax transfer figures for the last day:

     52	0
     39	2
      6	3
     13	4
      1	5
      1	6
      2	7
      1	9
      1	10
      1	11
      1	12
      1	13
      1	14

The first field is count or frequency, and the second is the number of
people who sent a total number of pages as shown. So "52 0" means that
52 people queued one or more jobs and could send only 0 pages. The
second line is "39 2" which means that 39 people sent a total of 2 pages
each. (This is the minimum length of most TPC jobs, because they have
a cover page, and a short message page after that. This means that 39
people sent one job each.) And so on.

The total is 121 people, who have tried sending faxes out. Out of them
52 people couldn't send out anything at all, as we can see. This is
unacceptable by any standards, I would think. Harald Pollack has said that
any public fax broadcaster will encounter about 40% failures. Another
gentleman has been using Multitech modems and has reported 5 to 10%
failures only. I am reporting about 45% faxes failed, which means perhaps
60 to 80% of alls calls made, failing. (This is because each fax fails
only after it has made several attempts to go through.)

Another figure shows that 242 pages were transmitted successfully,
but 313 error-calls were recorded. These errors exclude the ones where
carrier couldn't be established. This means that each of these 313 calls
were completed at the Telco level, and so will be billed to me. Is this
typical? I am sure all TPC operators who use Hylafax will be getting
their daily report from "faxcron". Can they send me a five line email
just cutting out the day's "Total" line from yesterday's report, together
with a line giving which area they operate in?

Most of us run TPC as a voluntary service. We need to cut wasteful
expenditure.  We use Hylafax, and we need the Hylafax community to
come together to figure out whether there is indeed any problem in
the software which might be increasing errors, as Harald's and others'
mails have hinted. I have not seen much discussion on the Hylafax
mailing lists about these fundamental aspects of its behaviour; most of
the discussion revolves around new setup problems, cover pages, and the
like, which are important but are not of use in this specific case.

Is Sam Leffler still active on this list or with this software? Is Matt
Apitz or David Woolley or anyone else in a position to take up these
issues and bring down the errors, specially with ZyXEL modems? One set
of ZyXEL users who don't use Hylafax, swear by its fax implementation.
Should all Hylafax users then switch out of ZyXEL to Multitech? Or
should all TPC operators switch out of Hylafax?

Hoping for more responses on this list,

regards,
Shuvam