Section 0 : Introductory

Q022: Is HylaFAX able to receive 100s of faxes?

Q.

Is HylaFAX able to receive 100s of faxes?

A.

Date: 28 April 2000 22:42
From: John Williams <williams@morinda.com>
Subject: Re: Is Hylafax able to receivee hundreds of facsimiles?

No problem.

We have a hylafax server running on a pentium pro 200 for about two years now. 30 Multitech modems on an Digiboard multitech board, receiving 6000-7000 pages per day. Incoming faxes average 2-3 pages. Outgoing volume is much less, but some are very large (up to 80 pages).

If that's not enough, we another server: Dual pentium II with a Digiboard DataFire RAS card (48 onboard modems and a T1 connector). No stats on this one. It's supposed to replace the first one, which is running so well, we just haven't bothered yet.

~ John Williams

Addendum: 16 Feb 2001...

I have received several messages asking about my setup recently, so I thought I would send an update to the whole list.

Our volume is a lot less now, mainly due to global decentralization. We now have HylaFAX servers in 3 (soon 4) countries, and a voice mail system, all of which receive hundreds of pages per day, but not thousands.

We are using the Digi DataFire RAS card for our main fax server now. The configuration for it is almost the same as the "class2.0" configuration file. We used that file, but had to change one line because the modem did not seem to respond properly to AT+FCC=? We changed the Class2DCCQueryCmd entry to manually set the modem capabilities, so HylaFAX does not have to ask for them:

Class2DCCQueryCmd:     !(0-1),(0-5),(0-4),(0-2),(0-3),(0-1),0,(0-7)    # query for modem capabilities

If someone wants more infomation to include in a modem list somewhere, just tell me what information you need.

Several people have asked how we handle routing so many faxes.

We don't do anything fancy; it's all based on the incoming modem device. The company phone switch maps each incoming phone number to one or more modems, and the faxrcvd script simply prints the faxes to the appropriate department's printer, with lines like this:

  ### Marketing
  if [ "$DEVICE" = "ttyG013" -o "$DEVICE" = "ttyG014" ] ; then 
   /usr/local/bin/tiff2ps -pa1 -h10.875 -w8.5 -H14.0 -L0.5 $FILE 2>/dev/null | lpr -h -Pmarketingq
  fi        

Human eyes do the rest.

~ John Williams

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