[hylafax-users] Fax Broadcasting

["Shawn Zernik" <szernik@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Title: Message

Hylafax Users:

 

I just wanted to introduce myself to the list.  I am working with a client that does fax broadcasting and we have setup a server running Slackware Linux 10 with 12 modems.  the servers configuration is with two internal ISA USR modems, and 10 external Topic serial modems connected through USB to serial connectors.  The server is used to broadcast faxes ranging from 8000 to 12000 fax numbers.

 

We have found the following problems with the server:

 

    1) reliable works for about 2000 faxes.

    2) drives fill up: logging turned all the way up

    3) when drive fills, the fax modems hang

    4) recently, the fax server stopped sending and stopped processing the queue

 

I'm going to turn down the logging to better assist the broadcast troubleshooting.  We are experiencing from 60% to 80% success rate.  I have written a custom app to process a CSV file and generate broadcasting script.  We have been using this server for two days and I have found a few things that I will be working on to automat the process:

 

    1) stop script - this will stop the server, and faxgettys, empty the send and doc queues

    2) removal - this program will find that last logged success/failure, by greatest fax id, and remove all broadcasts before it from the broadcast script

    3) start script - this will bring everything back online, faxgetty and hylafax

 

I have found that when the faxes fail, sorting faxstat -d by id and removing the everything to the last phone number in the fax script useful.  If the model become wedged, it's useful to stop hylafax and fax getty to reset hardware without rebooting.  To prevent double faxes, clearing the document queue is necessary because the server is about 100+ faxes queued over what's sent.  I am about to have the first 12,000 fax run complete tomorrow.  The server has been restarted 3 times so far.  Exact reasons unknown, just clues.

 

the server is configured on a PIII 550 with 196MB ram.  The master HD is 4gb.  We have mounted an 80GB for the hylafax directory.  This broadcast has used about 50% of the 80g drive.  I had to move /var/log and /var/spool/mail to the 80gb drive to prevent drive filling.

 

Any suggestions would be quite useful and anyone who has used this application for large scale fax broadcasting, please contact me.

 

Sincerely,

Shawn Zenrik

Internetwork Consulting