[hylafax-users] Fax Broadcasting / Blasting

[Billy Kimble <bkimble@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello again,

We're trying to set up an efficient fax broadcaster / blaster using Hylafax. I've searched the archives and the net, and all of the information I'm seeing is either out of date or wrong for what we're trying to accomplish. Most of the users on our system send only a handful of faxes, spread out through the day. These are the users we like because they have a consistent rate of sending. A single modem is used for these customers for a few minutes, then it is happily released and ready to pick up or send the next fax.

Then you have your blasters and broadcasters. Our application supports sending as many faxes as your subscription allows for. This means that users will send 500 - 1000 faxes at a time. Right now, we're using the Hylafax FTP  client to submit n-number jobs based on how many destinations the user wants to send to. The faxes are identical, there are just a lot of destinations. When this happens, all 23 of our modems get bogged down with sending this 1 persons swarm of faxes, and no modems are available to pick up or send for other customers. They are hogging the machine with their blasting.

I know that you can designate certain modems as 'send only' and others as 'receive only'. This will still make some of our modems dedicatedly send 1000 faxes, delaying all of the other user faxes. Everything that I've read in the archives mentions using sendfax -d (num1) -d (num2)  .. or alternatively sendfax -z some_number_file. In testing, this does the exact same thing that my 'loop through the numbers and make a job for each' does. It eats up as many modems as it possibly can. 

I noticed in the FTP  Client, there are "group" commands. JGPARM* etc. It seems like I need to somehow associate all of these  jobs with a group, and tell the group to send them one at a time. Unfortunately I can't find anything online as to how to do this.  The FTP  Client documentation is notoriously difficult to find, if it even exists, and the usual 'reverse engineer sendfax -vv' solution is not helping me here. 

Basically if a user is blast faxing the same fax I want to decide on the fly, based on how many faxes he is sending, how many modems to assign to him and his hundreds or thousands of faxes. What can I do here? Thanks in advance.

Billy Kimble

Senior Software Engineer

Inc21.com

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