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I am experiencing an interesting problem with Hylafax I am running Hylafax 4.1.5 on Red Hat Linux 7.2 This is a legacy machine that I inherited when I started,
Hylafax is used to take emails and fax them to various places via the X-FAX-*
headers with faxmail. The problem started that the modem would get stuck in the “Waiting
for modem to come ready” state and never come online. After doing
various things to try to fix it, it would start sending out messages that it
was “wedged”. There is quite a lot of documentation about
this problem in its various incarnations; however none of the solutions offered
much help except the “upgrade to the newest version” fix, which was
kind of a last resort as this is a production machine. In the end that is
what I decided on, and the latest version of Hylafax that claims to support
such an old version of Red Hat was 4.2.3, so I tried to install it. After
getting it to install, it had no problem finishing the queue of faxes that was
left behind by the old version, so it had no problem with the “Waiting
for modem to come ready” state. This brings me to my next problem: In order for emails to be converted to fax for use with
faxmail, an interesting solution was implemented on our end to support
this. I read several of the posts and FAQ’s about how to get fax
mail to work with sendmail however that is not what was done here, what WAS
done was an alias was set up for a user that basically piped the email to the
faxmail program such as this in the aliases file: Myalias: “|/usr/bin/faxmail –n –d
“ Now this worked FINE with Hylafax 4.1.5, however for some
reason it will NOT work with 4.2.3? Seemed strange to me. In the end
I had to roll back to the previous version because, like I said, this is a
production machine and the faxes HAD to go out. I was afraid that the
previous version would just wedge the modem again, but so far so good with
that, as it has been going good for about a day and a half now, but I am still
rather fearful that the same problem will come up again and I will have a
similar situation where I need to upgrade, besides it would be nice just to
have the newer functionality. So in the end if anyone could offer any kind of help as to
how or why things get stuck in the “Waiting for modem to come ready”
state, or why faxmail stops working the way we have it set up with version
4.2.3 that would be of great help. Also of note, this system probably ran
for 3 years flawlessly until last week, when out of no where this wedge state
started to appear. I am also not beyond thinking that the modem hardware
could be going out, but would like to make sure before going out and buying a
new modem. Other details: Modem = 3Com 56k Office Connect Business Modem Just ask if anyone would like further details. Jason Osborne Systems Administrator Medfusion, Inc |