flexfax: format_failed problems to multiple destinations

[Dave Bloom <dave@andromeda.rutgers.edu>]

Good day.

My client currently faxes research reports to a large customer base
using a SirenFax back-end that is being retired. Our plan is to 
replace SirenFax with HylaFAX.

We require the ability to send a single TIFF/F file, already in the
appropriate resolution, to hundreds of users with a single invocation
of sendfax.  We may have dozens of such documents in the queue, each
destined for the same hundreds of customers, meaning jobs are often
blocked waiting for faxes to complete to the same recipient.
Our faxing infrastructure is comprised of multiple Sun Ultra 2 servers
each with 96 Multitech modems running HylaFAX 4.0pl2.

We are seeing two major problems with this approach:

   (1) Sometimes a fax is blocked because there is already a fax
       in the process of being transmitted to the same recipient. When
       the earlier fax completes and the next fax is being readied
       for transmission, 'notify' sometimes complains
       of a 'format_failed' type error, and the doneq status field
       lists the following reason:

           "status:Unable to open shared document file"

        Symbolic links with names like "docq/doc59.tif;30" are
        left around, pointing to nonexisting files when this happens.


   (2) faxqclean seem's to punt on deleting documents submitted in
       this fashion, issuing complaints of the type:
           "docq/doc59.tif.64: ignored, file has 7 links"

The above two problems lead me to believe that HylaFAX is not ready
for prime-time for anything other than fax jobs destined for single
recipients.  I will split the jobs if I have to, but I imagine doing
so will impact greatly on the throughput of the server.

Any insights, comments or suggestions would be most welcomed.

Thanks.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Dave Bloom	               "But meanwhile, I'm still thinking..."
Neversoft Corp   
dave@andromeda.rutgers.edu