[asterisk-users] Asterisk IAXmodem HylaFax?

[Colin Anderson]

I run HylaFAX on a separate box from my dual PRI Asterisk box, and Asterisk
relays the call to HylaFAX when it detects the fax. It relays the call on a
private subnet with a crossover Ethernet cable with the slin codec. I have
over 200 IAXmodems running on the HylaFAX box, which is an underclocked
Athlon 64 running CentOS with a terabyte RAID5 array. HylaFAX automatically
converts the fax to PDF and emails it to the enduser. Mail to fax works fine
as well, except my Exchange server mungs the mimetype so it chokes on
attachment conversion from Exchange, still trying to figure that one out.
Fax volume is 100-500 faxes a day from a couple thousand potential senders,
with a reject rate well under 1%. Load average on the HylaFAX box is usually
like 0.01 or 2, with only 256 meg RAM consumed on the server for HylaFAX,
sendmail, the usual suspects running. Overall, an outstanding solution that
was done for a couple grand. Heap praises on Lee Howard and Steve Underwood
for IAXModem and the SpanDSP libraries which made this possible. (I know
they read these lists so I don't mind buttering their bread) 
 
One unusual thing I had to do was to get my reject rate below 1% I had to
alter the Ethernet txqueuelen parameter to 2000 from the stock 1000.
Otherwise, works like a champ and it's a set-it and forget-it solution. It's
been up for 6 months now without a reboot or any maintenance at all (you can
afford to be lazy about log rotation and such when you have a terabyte to
play with). Contrast this with our Windows Zetafax server that requires a
weekly reboot plus hand-wringing over whether to install weekly patches (and
we paid $10K,  just for the software). The only thing that keeps me from
ditching Zetafax is it has a slick client that people like to use, unlike
the barebones / kooky / barely-working assortment of clients available for
Hylafax (Yes, I looked at Cypheus. It's crap. Yes I looked at WinHFC. It's
good, but bare-freakin-bones. Yes, I looked at HylaFSP, slick but the
wizards would drive my users insane. They just want to send the fax, dammit,
not go through 4 or 5 pages of wizards.)
 
You also said:
 
" (HylaFax and IAXmodem on distant machines)"
 
If by "distant" you mean on a seperate subnet or across the Internet or WAN
connection, that probably won't work well enough for production use. 

-----Original Message-----
From: Damon Estep [mailto:damon at suburbanbroadband.net]
Sent: Friday, August 11, 2006 6:42 AM
To: Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion
Subject: [asterisk-users] Asterisk IAXmodem HylaFax?



According to the wiki page
http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/Asterisk+IAXmodem
<http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/Asterisk+IAXmodem> 

 

There are a couple of ways to integrate Asterisk and HylaFax with IAXmodem;

 

*	IAXmodem as HylaFax modem, both HylaFax and Asterisk on the same
machine 

*	IAXmodem in conjunction with termnetd+ttyd from the termpkg package
(HylaFax and IAXmodem on distant machines) 

Does anyone have any experience that they would be willing to share with the
load and/or other performance caveats using termnetd+ttyd to connect call
origination on an Asterisk box with HylaFax on another box?

Is it better to just get another PRI and card and run another instance of
Asterisk on the HylaFax box, or is the combination of IAXmodem, termnetd,
and ttyd lightweight enough to not have this concern?

Thanks.

 

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