flexfax: A Hylafax Success Story

[Rob Embry <Rob.Embry@emctest.com>]

I rarely post to this mailing list although I monitor it daily.  I thought
y'all would appreciate the story of my little fax server that I retired
today with honors.

Over 3 years ago I was asked to provide a network based fax solution for my
company, and do it CHEAP!  We have approximately 110 machines in two
locations on a mixed *nix and NT network.

Using an already obsolescent IBM PS/1 ValuePoint 486/33 with a 512MB hard
drive and 8MB of RAM and a couple of Zoom fax modems,  I installed a Linux
1.x kernel (Slackware) and brought up Hylafax on it.  I installed WHFC on my
users' desktops, and modified faxrcvd to route inbound faxes for dispatch to
my receptionist via email.

For over three years the little darlin' has cranked along sending and
receiving over 2000/faxes per month with nary a hiccup.  When the traffic
load built up we bumped it to 20MB RAM to alleviate the ghostscript
bottleneck.  

About 18 months ago we needed to be able to fax purchase orders (formerly
printed on multi-part pre-printed forms), including logos and signatures,
directly from our text-based manufacturing application running on HP-UX.
The recommended solution from the mfg software vendor was a MS Exchange
based product for fax and an MS-based forms product costing a total of over
$7000.  With a little perl magic and heavy tweaking of Postscript output
from MS Word, I came up with a Hylafax solution that cost about 100 hours of
my time (not cheap) but no $$$$ out of the company's pocket.

Since the fax server was one of the last 486's still cranking around here,
we decided to get upgrade it although it was still working just fine and had
no Y2K date roll-over problems.  So today at 12 noon, the new fax server
came up without a hitch and the old one will be laid to rest.

Rob Embry
EMC Test Systems
Austin, TX