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

[Shuvam Misra <shuvam@spacenetindia.com>]

| Thanks for posting it.  It gives us a "standard of comparison", which I
| was not able to relate to from your statistics.
| First thing I can say is WOW!!!

Thanks. I need every bit of sympathy you can spare.

| I don't have a whole lot to recommend except that I must concur with 
| Darren that possibly the modem config file is not optimum for your modem.
| Have you tried an alternative handshaking ( rtscts if it is xon or 
| the other way around ).

Look at http://www.spaceNETindia.com/fax/ and the config files are
there.

| Do you have the most recent firmware for the modem (don't hit me, I 
| always try to start with the simple & work to the more difficult <g>).

Yes. it's 1.19. And no, I don't mind you asking. My modem has a
user-upgradable firmware, and it overwrites the flash ROM. I've upgraded
it myself, many times, starting with 1.13 (I think) to 1.19 today.

| Have you considered sent off one of the detailed HylaFax logs to 
| the modem manufacturer & got their feedback?  I have seen where they
| will even try sending a fax to the same number ( given that the
| receiver is cooperative ) in an attempt to determin the problem.

Oh yes. One of the "cc:" above is Ketan Sanghvi who is the ZyXEL
distributor for India, and another is Harald Pollack, who was contacted
by ZyXEL technical support in Austria as an expert to help me. ZyXEL
has been very cooperative and helpful, and Harald has been a wizard with
faxing and ZyXELs, and has even sent faxes from Austria to some numbers
in India which caused me grief. But the Phase B errors remain.

In case you want to see the logs, look at one day's error dumps by
looking at http://www.spaceNETindia.com/faxerrors.txt. It's 1.5MB.

| The USR Sportsters, one of the most popular modems sold, are agreed by
| EVERYONE, that for commercial use, the ARE JUNK!!!.

Yes, everyone tells me so. They also tell me that ZyXEL is one of the
best around. They just can't tell me what's wrong with my setup.

| > No local dialtone                                              167     25.3
| why are there 167 faxes where there is no local dial dial tone????

That was a transient problem. I rebooted the modem and things came back
to normal. I think there was some problem once with the modem, after the
thing had been running unattended for a long time, and the TCP/IP
dialout script (which runs on the same modem) accidentally broke the
lock on the faxsend and tried accessing the modem while faxing was being
attempted. It's not a typical case.

| I just had another thought... I am sure you have posted this before, but
| what kind of system is your server?  If it was under powered, or running
| a heavy commercial load, maybe that would affect critical timing.

This is a P133 with 32MB EDO RAM, 4GB IDE drive, and running Linux
2.0.30 with Hylafax binary distribution 4.0pl2. The system has an Intel
motherboard, and the serial ports are on the m'board itself. It runs
almost nothing else apart from the fax software all day. Typical load
averages are less than 0.1.

Shuvam