Re: flexfax: Weird Phase B Error (with solution)

[David Woolley <david@djwhome.demon.co.uk>]

> reference. Please respond to me directly, I am not subscribed on the
> mailinglist.

I'm rather reluctantly replying to this, given your failure to subscribe to
the list...

> REMOTE HANGUP: Unspecified Transmit Phase B error (code 20)
> 
> when using WHFC. To make things even more worse, the sender of the fax get
> a email notification "all right, fax sended" (which is IMHO a very Bad
> Thing).

Diagnosing Transmit Phase B errors (which are the most common ones)
requires the session logs.

> the output for WHFC. This postscript files start with
> 
> ESC%-12345X@PJL
> @PJL ENTER LANGUAGE = POSTSCRIPT
> %!PS-Adobe-3.0

These are not Postscript files, they are Xerox printer files.  A Postscript
file would start on the third line.

> . All right, this wouldn't recogniced as postscript. I changed the
> typerules file and wrote a script which produced 'real' postscript from
> this.

The proper fix is to use a sensible Postscript printer driver for your
fax printer.  There are some on Windows.  (If anyone has access to the right
documentation and tools, and the time to do it, it might be an idea to
create a hylafax/ghostscript printer driver for Windows - probably just
changing the names on one of the common ones.)

> 
> This doesn't work. I you send a file via hfaxd, the typerules mechanism
> isn't used for processing documents. The whole document type checking in

That is fairly clearly documented - TIFF and PS are the only formats 
supported by the server; the client must convert to one of these before
submission.
 
> - The typechecking in hfaxd/FileSystem.c++ is not very smart and not
> sufficient, specially when dealing with Windows Clients or other
> non-sendfax systems.

It behaves as specified; configure the client properly.
 
> - The faxq-System makes no further checking of the page data; 

That would be paranoia.

> 
> - The error message "Unspecified Transmit Phase B error" is very
> misleading. Maybe there is a way to fix this.

It's really rather difficult to diagnose without the logs, but it 
really is a case of garbage in garbage out.

> - Creating a "all ok"-notification with this error is not ok. 

Again diagnosing this requires the logs.

Note my experience of doing this with a beta version was that you simply
got an empty fax.