[hylafax-users] a new (?) waiting for modem to come ready problem

[Reid Conti <rconti@cobaltgroup.com>]

Hi.. I'm having a constant problem with hylafax on a linux box with 7
modems.  Our fax system is basically mission-critical, but was put
together a LONG time ago and is very outdated.  Nobody remaining at the
company knows much about it, I just barely know enough to keep it
running.  I'd love to be able to upgrade to see if it solves all of our
problems, but frankly that's not an option -- it's so hacked together,
we'd be lucky if it ever worked again.

So anyway, here is the problem.  Every month or so, we get paged because
the fax queue has gone over 100 faxes.  When this happens, I usually stop
hfaxd and faxq, restart them, and then run faxmodem on all of the modems.  

Once the processes are all running, faxes are processed more-or-less
approrpiately... however, the queue disappears very slowly if at all.  The
problem is, say, 3 modems will be processing the faxes, and 4 will be hung
at waiting for modem to come ready, with 127 faxes pending.  If all of a
sudden we have 128 faxes pending, another modem fires up and starts
processing.. if we have 130 faxes pending, enough modems fire up to kill
off the queue surplus, but then once the queue drops back down to
approximately where it was at when hfax was started, more and more modems
drop into waiting for modem to come ready state, and just sit there.. so
we can have 120 faxes pending with all 7 modems saying waiting for modem
to come ready!  If one fax comes in, a modem instantly comes online to
fire it out.

I read the FAQ and searched the list archives for information on this, but
they seem to mostly apply to people who are having this problem on ALL
modems, not intermittantly, and not in a weird pattern like ours.

Also, I noticed the RingsUntilAnswer thing -- mine was set at 1, and now I
set it to 5 -- neither seems to change things.  The functionality of this
feature is unimportant, as we do not process incoming faxes at all, just
outgoing.

I can't figure out a way to display the version of hfaxd, but it's at
LEAST 2 years old running on a linux box with the 2.0.36 kernel (redhat
5.2 I believe).. there's a MOXA serial board hooked into some kind
distributor that goes into our USR Total Control modems..

Thanks for any help you can provide.. every time this comes up, I'm at
wit's end.. I spend all night manually resetting stuff constantly, trying
to get the number of faxes in the queue to drop.. eventually it seems to
go away on it's own.. 

- reid



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