Re: flexfax: DG/UX anyone?

[John Williams <williams@morinda.com>]

On Fri, 23 Oct 1998, Chris Wood wrote:
> Is anybody out there running hylafax/flexfax on Data General Unix? 
> (Just curious)
> 
> I'm thinking of building a fax-farm on a linux box or two for incoming
> faxes only (no outgoing). I'm looking at 6-8 faxmodems on it.  Needs to be
> able to route faxes to the right printer dependant on DID.  I'm building
> from scratch, so I'm not restricted by type of modems or anything.
> 
> What should I watch out for?  Is this a good application of Hylafax?  And
> lastly, is there anyone out there doing this?  I'd love to hear some
> testimonials.  :)

We are doing this.

Caldera Linux with the latest hylafax.  16 Modems off a Digiboard.  4 or
so are dedicated to receive only and the rest are send and receive.  Most
modems are in a pool controlled by the phone switch, so dialing one number
will pick any free line.  1 or 2 have different number assigned to them,
so we route to the printers based on the modem the fax was received on. 

The outbound faxes are coming from the Windows WHFC client, and from our
database system (reports generated based on a separate IVR system).  It
was important to dedicate a few to receive only, because the outbound load
gets heavy around the end of the month.

Caveats: 
Get one of the hylafax recommended modems.  We are using Multi-Tech
modems, which are working great.  We had some problems with Hayes brand.

Also since you are printing your faxes, I recommend a patch for tiff2ps
which I posted not long ago.  It makes it behave better when printing
faxes which are longer or shorter than the physical page.

You may need to customize the faxrcvd script to get it to route to the
printer just the way you want.


We tried two different Windows-based fax packages before this.  
Hylafax on Linux is much more stable, although I cannot compare specific
features, since I'm not the Windows sysadmin.  We were also able to get
rid of the IVR's flaky and expensive outbound fax server with the help of
a short perl script.  So really we replaced two windows fax servers with
one hylafax server.

~ John Williams