Re: flexfax: Important question

[Nico Garcia <raoul@cirl.meei.harvard.edu>]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

On Sun, 3 May 1998, Jay Higgins Jr. wrote:

> Hello,
> 	This may sound like a really stupid question, but i need help. 
> about a year ago, a former co-employee of mine found this software
> (hylafax). He told us that it would page a pager when the server goes
> down. He left, and never got it set up. Now it is my job to get it up and
> working. I jsut wanted to ask if Hylafax can really do that. can it page a
> alphanumeric pager when a server goes down? 

So, grasshopper, you seek wisdom. Snatch the source code from my
hand, and your training will be complete.

Excuse me, got silly there for a moment.

HylaFAX includes utilities to send page messages. It can dial a paging
server using the IXO/TAP protocol and send an alpha-numeric message,
and that is fairly easy to set up after installing the HylaFAX software.

The question is more, "what kind of computer system are you working
with?", to see if it can run HylaFAX. And "do you have a paging
service that will accept IXO/TAP connections?" And "how will you detect
that the server is down, so it can trigger a page?"

> if i can, will this work....we have a mirror that we are going to set up. 
> will it work on that, if i put a hylafax server on the mirror and the
> client on real server.  bascially, i need help getting started, i am
> really getting lost reading about this software in the web page. 

If your server is dead, it won't be able to do *ANYTHING*. This seems
an inappropriate test. A better test might be for the mirror to mount
or access something on the server, and then itself send a distress
page message.

It might also be possible to have a page sent by the server under
various circumstances, but you would have to select on what basis to
send what messages.

We'd be glad to answer questions, I think. But if you need someone to
sit down with you and plan a real "emergency handling" system, you
might want to talk with a consultant or engineer familiar with your
industry and with the operating systems in question.

What system are you running? And what kind of "server", providing what
services?

			Nico Garcia
			Senior Engineer, CIRL 
			Mass. Eye and Ear Infirmary
			raoul@cirl.meei.harvard.edu

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: 2.6.2

iQCVAwUBNUzhxj/+ItycgIJRAQG8VQP+LGNG3Yu5Glu6ldO38FAKJMxVAOKQAMOM
5Yt/TK9FyMoWeOxvYiUE1gqMFzLU9LqELWran6Oa5uKwkKCBUhAKzqtgmSvqICdu
qgw7SXd2OkJ3G7Cb3lwSjUSDoXnGLj84P2Ay8jCw1JayTgbf4zJjLwLaiZ1zvx41
cG4qAUdhH2M=
=rO/Z
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----