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

[Lee Howard <faxguy@deanox.com>]

At 08:21 PM 7/17/01 -0700, Reid Conti wrote:
>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together a LONG time ago and is very outdated.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.

Forgive me for truncating your message here, but let me be the first to
assure you that upgrading is *at least* the first step in the right
direction here.  If the person who performs the upgrade is competent, then
he should make a backup of everything so that in the case that things go
awry with the new configuration, that the old one can be restored without
effect.  And, if the person who performs the upgrade knows HylaFAX well
enough, they should be able to evaluate the configuration sufficiently to
reproduce it with new setup.  In fact, most of the admin configuration
files from 4.0 versions can be used with 4.1 (with a few exceptions where
transition documentation is available).

However... it sounds to me like your problem is with faxq, and honestly,
the real way to fix that is to not run faxmodem and use faxgetty instead.
"Waiting for modem to come ready" is a normal and usual fax status when
using faxmodem, and frankly, unless a fax is in-progress, faxstat output is
useless without faxgetty.  Note that faxstat shows *fax status* and not
modem status.  If there is no fax in-progress, then faxstat output is
meaningless - however, when using faxgetty, the fax status returns to an
"Idle" to await a RING, which can help in deducing the status of the modem.
 I quote the faxq man page:

                         When faxq is  run  in  conjunction  with
       faxgetty processes, it is not necessary to use faxmodem to
       specify modems; instead the programs communicate  informa­
       tion about the status and capabilities of each modem.  The
       latter setup provides a more robust  and  powerful  system
       and is the intended way for the software to operate.

Note that last line which says that faxq was intended to operate with
faxgetty.  I think faxmodem is only really suitable for instances where
IRQs are shared between modems which will not be used simultaneously or
where system resources are so low (i.e. i386SX-16) that the constant burden
of faxgetty is undesireable.

(By the way, the parameter is RingsBeforeAnswer and not RingsUntilAnswer.)

So, in conclusion I think you should upgrade and begin using faxgetty.
It's not that hard, really.

Lee.



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