According to the wiki page 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. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.digium.com/pipermail/asterisk-users/attachments/20060811/c16c4e9d/attachment.htm
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@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. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.digium.com/pipermail/asterisk-users/attachments/20060811/aac66b6a/attachment.htm
Damon Estep wrote:> According to the wiki page > 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 >In my opinion this is the ideal way to run Asterisk+IAXmodem+HylaFAX. If your situation does not permit this, then yes, there are alternatives.> * 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? >In my experience getting the termnetd/ttyd connection to be resiliant (i.e. what does it do if the connectivity drops and then comes back up later) is not a trivial matter. The other alternative, if you have a typical LAN connection between the HylaFAX box and the Asterisk box, is to run IAXmodem connections over the LAN - so your iaxmodem instances are on the HylaFAX box communicating over the LAN with the Asterisk box. In my experience you really shouldn't experience any jitter on a LAN, and if you do then you probably have network problems. I find this to be a better option than the termnetd/ttyd option in cases where it can be used (i.e. LANs). IAXmodem and HylaFAX proper should not cause much load or performance degredation at all... so little that you can probably neglect it. However, the parts where you do need to worry about load/performance is to do with image conversion... what you do with the received TIFF image *after* it's received... what kinds of incoming documents are handled and how, etc. Lee.
Actually lately I have been poking around my Visual Studio .NET IDE and ruminating about writing a client since the FTP protocol HylaFAX uses is quite well documented; the other advantage with using VS instead of Python or gtk or whatever is you can leverage the excellent Microsoft ODBC/DAO plumbing for address books, logging and the like (and a consistient Windows GUI, which Cypheus for example has in spades, it's just too bad it's so flaky) The Zetafax client essentially uses port 139 and submits the .tif to a Windows share so I don;t think it would be really possible to modify it, interesting idea though. -----Original Message----- From: Lee Howard [mailto:faxguy@howardsilvan.com] Sent: Friday, August 11, 2006 11:36 AM To: Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion Subject: Re: [asterisk-users] Asterisk IAXmodem HylaFax? Colin Anderson wrote:> 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.)I agree with you that all public HylaFAX clients are not good. My guess is that you could probably do some work to get that slick Zetafax client to work with HylaFAX instead of the Zetafax server. Years ago I did similar work to get the RelayFax client to work with HylaFAX. Lee. _______________________________________________ --Bandwidth and Colocation provided by Easynews.com -- asterisk-users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users