Re: flexfax: partial solut. for HP-UX & USR Sport cannot send fax

[Robert Colquhoun <rjc@trump.net.au>]

Hi Steven,

At 14:05 2/11/98 -0500, Steven A DuChene wrote:
>OK, Over the weekend I tried setting HylaFAX up on one of my home Linux
>systems and experienced the same sort of Unspecified Transmit Phase B error
>with the same USR Sportster type of modem.

Oh yeah, lots of people have done that ;-)

>
>Finally I set the modem up as Class 1 instead of the Class 2.0 it claimed
>it could also support. That made a big improvement. At that point it was
>successfully dialing and connecting with the remote fax machine but the
>pages it sent through were squished. In looking through the docs and
>archives I seem where someone suggested turning down the ModemRate from
>38400 to 19200 on Sportster modems. Once I did that the pages transmitted
>were near perfect. The only problem was that even though the cover page
>was sent & received fine, there was some sort of glitch when the next
>page was sent. It would continue resending the next page a number of
>times (I never let it go more than 9 or 10 resends before removing the
>job). What was strange was that each time it would resend it the page
>would be squished more and more. The first time it sent the page it
>appeared full size but midway down there was a break/glitch in the image
>(I was testing with the golfer.ps example that comes with the ghostscript
>stuff).

I am guessing but this looks like some kind of flow control problem -
double check everything is either rts/cts or xon/xoff.  A log from the fax
transmission can tell this for sure.

Again i am guessing but the speed reduction might have allowed the modem to
send enough data  down the phone line that it didn't need to interrupt the
DCE at first - it was only later that you paid for it.

>Sunday evening I came in to work late and tried the same Class 1 & 19200
>setup with the Sportster on the HP-UX system and was able to send one
>fax through just fine to a fax machine here on site. Then I sent a
>second copy after the first completely cleared the queue but the modem
>appeared to be hung and would not reset. Even turning it off & on or
>stopping & restarting the HylaFAX stuff had no effect on it.

Reset the modem to factory defaults at&f, it might have a bad profile
loaded.  Did you try fuser on the serial port - with the multiple device
files cul, tty and cua it is really easy to have faxgetty on one and
uugetty on the other which sometimes causes stuff like this.

Again double check everything is consistent regarding flow control. ie the
modems config file, the output of stty and the modem itself.

>
>The end result of this is to persuade me to move to the suggested
>MultiTech MT1432BA modems for additional testing with the HP-UX
>systems at work. So far those seem to work fine right out of the
>box so to speak.

Umm - the factory settings of the multitech might default to rts/cts while
the Sportster is set to xon/off....either that or the Sportsters is way broken.

>
>If anyone has any ideas why the re-transmit problem seems to occur and
>the pages gets squished more and more each time it is re-transmitted
>I would appreciate know about that.

It tries to retransmit, usually because the receiving fax has indicated the
previous page you sent was corrupt.  I am thinking they are getting more
and more squished because the flow control is out of control.

Could you produce a log of the transmission?

- Robert