[hylafax-users] New way of using Eicom diva boards for fax reception

["Luke McKee" <hojuruku@xxxxxxxxx>]

> The Eicon Diva Server has a proprietary pseudo Class 2 interface.  This
> interface not only restricts the ability of HylaFAX to address protocol
> issues it also depends on Eicon firmware upgrades to address problems.  If
> you search the HylaFAX archives you will find numerous examples of Diva
> users who have required firmware upgrades which I'm willing to bet never get
> addressed.  Remember that fax is a tiny part of Eicon's revenue.

Andrew,

If you did more than selectively quote one part of the email and read
the link posted and the lines:

"It allows asterisk to answer and receive incoming faxes. In the
dialplan or through inotify you could create a new faxrecvd to handle
fax reception. This uses CAPI instead of an AT Hayes style interface
normally used by Hylafax."

:you would realize that it does not only use a "a proprietary pseudo
Class 2 interface"

I gave a short blurb about what the patch does. I.e. Use CAPI INSTEAD
of the AT interface to the fax board.

I'll now quote from the Hylafax configuration file about the
"proprietary class 2 interface"

"# on boards supporting V.34-fax,
# this may need to be 57600 ...
Class2ECMType: # follows Class 2.0 spec, not Class 2"
There are no other different options in the
/var/spool/fax/config/eicon-2 file except standard AT options for flow
control. I do accept that there may be some issues with the firmware
using fax class 2 but the some/all eicons support fax class 1.

In any case the whole point of my email that using CAPI (which is a
standard API) to do fax reception and then dispatch to hylafax might
bear better results.

I don't know what more to say other than please read a email and fact
check what you say before you go on the public record. I don't doubt
that the AT interface has had some issues - but what does that have to
do with CAPI?

I'd be good to get some feedback from a eicon user to see if this
patch works for them and improves reliability in fax reception.

As for Eicon boards using a central CPU / central point of failure
v.s. Mainpine using legacy  style 16550A UART a topic brought up by
yourself unrelated to Eicon specific feature of the original post:

It may be good SALES point for mainpine but it prevents your boards
scaling up to run more than 16 ports because each port takes an
interrupt. You are limited by the number of interrupts your bus
supports, or on modern PCs how many interrupts you can have per APIC
(24 - some already used by the system). PowerMacs will do better than
PCs here.

You could use interrupt sharing ... but that's not recommended. That's
why people by intelligent serial boards with one CPU that assists in
IO or devices with with a central CPU to assist with flow control and
interrupt handling. I know you guys have recently released a new model
of your card that uses PCI express. Maybe you could explain to the
list how the "sideband api" overcomes this drawback found in earlier
mainpine models in a different thread.

I made this post to assist Eicon users who may have posted their
problems to the list earlier. As Eicon hardware is more complex and
designed to be upscaled to more ports on one system than conventional
modems, a drawback at times could be compatibility issues between the
firmware and applications. The whole point of the post is maybe by
using the CAPI API for fax reception you would work around some of the
issues in the AT interface.

Cheers,

Luke

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