Avantfax Not Sending Faxes Correctly

[tieeem]

Okay bit of a strange issue here, so i'm going to try and describe the problem as logically as possible and in stages.

• We have 3 phone systems experiencing the same problem.
• Faxes APPEAR to be received with no problems

• All 3 have had avantfax install avantfax using the guide located at http://pbxinaflash.com/community/threads/the-incredible-pbx-logo-is-there-one.7198/#post-43583
• Our phone systems are sending out the faxes over ISDN using B410P cards

The problem:
When we try sending a PDF through avantfax to a local physical fax machine, or to another PIAF box with avantfax, after some time (around 3-4 minutes), the fax fails with the status "No response to PPS repeat"

In the pages column in Avantfax, it seems to vary on how many pages are actually sent before the error occurs. It's sometimes 0 and can sometimes get to the last page before failing, I.E, 5/6.

We have tried a PDF file created by our HP 4730 printer, a PDF file created via MS word, and also a .tiff, with each document varying in size and number of pages. All of these do not appear to work and generate the same error.

If we try a PDF with 1 page, then this will SOMETIMES work, perhaps 70% of the time, the other 30% the PPS repeat message occurs.

Here is what rasterisk says when we send a fax:

P[ 1] channel with stid:0 for one second still in use!
-- Called g:isdn1/XXXXXXXX *x=the number, blocked for privacy reasons
-- mISDN/1-u20 is proceeding passing it to IAX2/iax-fax2-13606
-- mISDN/1-u21 is ringing
-- mISDN/1-u21 answered IAX2/iax-fax2-13606

When the fax fails, with the "No Response to PPS repeat", rasterisk comes up with the following:

= Spawn extension (macro-dialout-trunk, s, 27) exited non-zero on 'IAX2/iax-fax2-13606' in macro 'dialout-trunk'
== Spawn extension (macro-dialout-trunk, s, 27) exited non-zero on 'IAX2/iax-fax2-13606'
-- Executing [h@macro-dialout-trunk:1] Macro("IAX2/iax-fax2-13606", "hangupcall|") in new stack
-- Executing [s@macro-hangupcall:1] GotoIf("IAX2/iax-fax2-13606", "1?skiprg") in new stack
-- Goto (macro-hangupcall,s,4)
-- Executing [s@macro-hangupcall:4] GotoIf("IAX2/iax-fax2-13606", "1?skipblkvm") in new stack
-- Goto (macro-hangupcall,s,7)
-- Executing [s@macro-hangupcall:7] GotoIf("IAX2/iax-fax2-13606", "1?theend") in new stack
-- Goto (macro-hangupcall,s,9)
-- Executing [s@macro-hangupcall:9] Hangup("IAX2/iax-fax2-13606", "") in new stack
== Spawn extension (macro-hangupcall, s, 9) exited non-zero on 'IAX2/iax-fax2-13606' in macro 'hangupcall'
== Spawn extension (macro-hangupcall, s, 9) exited non-zero on 'IAX2/iax-fax2-13606'
Hungup 'IAX2/iax-fax2-13606'

I have also collated what rasterisk shows up on the phone system which is receiving a fax, just incase these results can can provide insight

Possible reasons?

• There's a timeout on avantfax sending large documents

• Avantfax does not like ISDN

or

• We need to advise our telecoms provider(telstra) that our ISDN lines are used for faxing.

Please let me know if any additional information is needed, I will happily supply.

 

[jroper]

Hi

My wild guess is that there is an issue with quality on the digital lines.

Do you have a very good quality voip service provider you can test with, or indeed, via a simple trunk from one of your installs to the other.

Joe

 

[tieeem]

Thanks Joe,
We do have a voip line with Faktortel, however they only accept faxing over the t.38 protocol.

I turned this on through our phone system with the following

1) Setup udptl.conf and placed in /etc/asterisk/

2) add "t38pt_udptl=yes" to /etc/asterisk/sip_general_custom.conf

however when I do this, a "no carrier detected" appears as the status, although the system does dial the number and start sending the fax before "no carrier detected" appears, according to rasterisk

 

[jroper]

Hi

With a good quality provider, with an uncompressed codec (g711) you should be able to send a fax.

Yours

Joe

 

[tieeem]

Hi Joe,
I have figured out why avantfax is not sending large faxes. At least we think so.

Basically, it looks like hylafax sends out a fax in segments, from what I can tell there's 3 or 4 "segments" per page. Every time hylafax finishes a segment, it sends a PPS"partial page signal" to the fax machine it's sending to, to let that fax machine know there are more segments coming. It then sends a MPS (more pages, same document) signal to tell it what document the segments are part of.

So anyway, for some reason hylafax on our systems is randomly not receiving responses to its PPS requests from fax machines.

Hylafax will send the PPS 3 times and then cancel the job if there's no response. So from what I can tell this is a hylafax bug, which would make sense as we are currently using hylafax 4.4.4, whilst the newest version available is 6.0.4.

But then again no one else on this forum seems to have this issue, so maybe not?

 

[Reddog]

Hi All,

I work with Tieeem.

We are using the B410P with the Fonica Projects install instructions and sending faxes out over the ISDN lines. rasterisk reports no errors on the ISDN lines. Maybe it has something to do with our settings for mISDN?

We do not use VOIP for sending faxes as it does not work reliably.

Does someone have a similar setup or know anything about this who could shed some light on this issue?