Re: [hylafax-users] Help selecting a modem.

[Lee Howard <faxguy@deanox.com>]

At 10:45 AM 10/22/01 -0400, Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
>On Mon, Oct 22, 2001 at 02:28:01PM +0100, Thorsteinn Sigurdsson wrote:
>> After messing around with my current modem I've decided to get a new one.
>> The problem is that I need a modem that can send to all our client fax
>> machines (not most of them) without any complications.
>
>I believe Lee (who has a larger statistical universe than I from which
>to draw) will tell you that you're not going to get to 100.0% with
>*anything*, modem or fax machine, even in class 1.

Yeah.  I've done a lot of work on trying to acheive a 100% reliable
solution, and frankly, it's impossible unless you have control of all the
receipient machines, too.  I've never had any problems with current CVS
HylaFAX and a remote that I can control.

I've worked with fax machines (not HylaFAX systems) a lot, too, and
frankly, the situation is the same with them.  Unless you can control the
recipient, then 100% reliablity is virtually impossible.

The problems are that line noise is very difficult to cope with, and line
noise arises from just about anything, like a storm, or a solar flare, or a
busy telco switch, a foobarred satellite, or faulty equipment.

Another problem is that the remote machine may run out of paper, be turned
off in the middle of the faxing (this is actually more common on bulk
faxing), or other such things.

There are a few known hardware incompatibilities where one modem cannot
handshake with the other.  This type of thing is completely controlled by
hardware, and there's not much that HylaFAX programming can do to fix such
situations.  But this is really rather rare, and is more frequently a
configuration problem than a hardware issue.

That said... I have production HylaFAX systems that receive nearly 100
faxes daily and send about 500 faxes weekly with no consistent problems.
In other words, the receiving is nearly perfect, and any errors cannot be
reproduced.  As for sending, it's about 99% perfect, and that 1% of
failures I am attributing to user intervention on the remote side (like
turning off the machine in the middle of the transmission - which happens
when bulk faxing).  As with receiving, when sending I cannot reproduce the
errors consistently.

Generally when something happens once I remember it, but I don't worry
about it.  I only worry about a problem when it happens the second time.
Computers and equipment in general do lots of funny things one time and one
time only.  I'd spend every second of my waking day chasing freak
occurrances on systems if I handled it differently.

Lee.



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