[hylafax-users] Digi Acceleport RAS update

[bill@castandcrew.com (Bill Young)]

A couple weeks back I posted my experiences with a couple multi-port
fax/modem cards.  We've now had the second card that I mentioned (the
Digi Acceleport RAS 8) in use for a few weeks and I wanted to give an
update on how it is working.

For sending faxes, the AccelePort RAS card has been working very well.
There are comparitvely few send failues and most send failures go through
the second time.  We do get a few fax machines that the board refuses to
send to.  But, it's significantly fewer than other fax modems we've tried.
It seems comparable to the dedicated fax boards we were previously using
(DigiFax).

This board does have some problems receiving faxes.

The first problem is that after a couple of days, one of the modems
will stop answering the phone.  All the parameters for the modem in
question are set like the other modems on the card, an ATZ is done, and
it just won't say RING when a call comes in.  Doing an ATA during this
time will answer the phone.  Digi said they have heard about this and
they think it has been corrected in a newer version of their firmware.
Unfortunately all of the newer versions of the firmware they sent me
caused other problems.  With the newer firmware in place, outgoing faxes
no longer work.  The error produced is "Modem protocol error (unknown
post-page response)".  Firmware version J3 is the latest firmware that
does not generate this error.  We're working with Digi now to correct
this problem so that we can see if my original problem has been corrected.

The other problem we're having with receiving is that a non-trival
percentage of incoming faxes are coming in corrupt.  This could be a
problem we have with the settings (maybe flow control) or it could be a
problem with the card or drivers.  We're using the standard class2.0
config file (which the Digi indicated should work).  We've tried
turning on copy quality processing, but that doesn't seem to help.
We're getting horizontal lines or bands across the page frequently.
We also get pages that it looks like every other scan line is missing.
Tracking this down, we get messages like: "Fax3Decode2D: fax04050.tif:
Bad code word at scanline 1059 (x 1728)" from fax2ps.  If anyone has
seen and solved this type of problem, I'd appreciate hearing from you.

We haven't had any complete port lockups, like we had with the other
multiport modem that we tried.  Digi does have tools to help diagnose
the problems.  I think these problems are solvable.  It's just too bad
it didn't work perfect right out of the box.

Thanks,
Bill


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