[asterisk-users] Faxing: Anyone have a compiled executable?

[David Backeberg]

On Fri, Jan 8, 2010 at 8:59 AM, William Stillwell (Lists)
<william.stillwell-lists at ablebody.net> wrote:
> This is what I was using at the time:
>
> asterisk-1.4.21.2

I really, really prefer the faxing in 1.6. It's so nice to configure
compared to 1.4. I'll leave it to the ChangeLog and anybody else who
wants to chime in on actual differences.

> I was using PSTN.

Great. Because trying to track down voip faxing problems is much worse.

> hardware provided determine from examining server logs. But some callers
> just could not send a fax, it would fail every time, and I just couldn't
> reproduce it..

Did you ever record your faxes? When I was troubleshooting things, I
started recording 100% of faxes, and then just blowing them away after
a few days with a cron. If I wanted to go back and troubleshoot a
particular customer, I could filter by their calls and listen to what
was going on.

It was amazing how lousy some of the faxes were and it was obviously
the customer's fault. I never would have been able to tell that
without listening to the audio recordings of the fax transmission. In
other cases, it was robodialers wardialing the world, and they weren't
even sending a fax. I discovered I had to be VERY careful how I
calculated error rate.

If you count by absolute successes and failures, the early failure
rate looked awful. This was directly correlated to the customers with
crap connections retrying the same faxes that were never going to
succeed over and over again. When I instead sorted successes and
failures by sending phone number, I got very high 90s success rate.
This of course, also requires that you're keeping logging in a way
that makes this kind of diagnosis possible. Hopefully you have good
records.