Faxing: One man's struggle to cope with 15 year old technology.

[fielderj]

Chapter 1: Why faxing has just replaced sales people as the bain of my existence.

I have about 5 clients, all with a combination of fax servers, stand-a-lone faxes, and modems all of which work about 20% of the time. I have 6608 Blades, 6624 Blades, and 3662 routers with FXS and FXO ports. Callmanagers are running 3.1.2c-SPB with the corresponding gateway loads, and the routers are running 12.2.6 IP-Plus (I've tried about 15 different versions of code). I have tried changing restart timers, db padding on the gateways, ecm enable/disable, just about every option in my dial-peer statements, TAC cases, the works. For the life of me, and trust me I've put a lot of life into this, I can't complete a fax better then 1 out of 5 times. I started this thread in hopes that other people, who at one time or another who have had this problem and fixed it, could explain to me exactly how they have their setups configured so that I might emulate them as closely as possible. Also I'd like to hear from anyone who has had this problem and just decided to not deal with it and buy 1FB's or just not do faxing from CCM. The scenario’s I have are:

Stand-a-lone fax to 6624 to 6608 to pstn.

fax server (RightFax) to 3662-fxs to 6608 to pstn.

modem to 6624 to 6608 to pstn.

I have been able to get faxing up to 80% by doing fax to fxs to fxo to pstn all within the same router but that solution isn't too far away from just buying 1FB's for all my faxes.

[paul.harrison]

Chapter 2: Why are the most influential people in a company the most technicaly incompetent?

Having finaly fixed the Fax problem on a site where the directors would print out documents and Fax them to each other rather than E-mail each other, I know what you are going through.

We had a scenario with 6608 and 6624 blades in the same chassis and accross a WAN (OK so it was a 100Mb/s WAN but it's still a WAN), with Modems and Faxes.

The loads we used were

Analog WS-X6624 AppLoad: A00203010026 DSPLoad: A003L031

Digital WS-X6608 AppLoad: D00403010033 DSPLoad: D005L031

The only problem is if they loose contact with the Call manager server for more than 30 seconds they don't recover (I didn't say the fix was perfect), but now faxes are over 95% succesful, and we blame the other 5% on Fax protocol being crap. (hey we got away with it)

From testing it seems to make no difference at all what you set the re-start timers to, as the blades would always default to fax pass through (the 6608 refused to believe it was not in North America).

I guess Cisco have real problems with FAX and Modem traffic that they would love to correct by you buying an AS5300 platform!!

Paul

[vcornett]

I am having the same problem with trying to use a fax server connected to fxs ports on a 3662, which also has a PRI for PSTN access. Within the same chassis I thought it would work well but receiving a fax seems to fail everytime. Sending is a little better.

I feel from this forum and my own experience that Cisco has a long way to go with fax and modem over IP. Unfortunately, for those of us who have to support it that stinks.

Vince

[christopheryoung]

Having the same issue with faxing.

fax to 6624 fxs blade, into 6608pri for PSTN connectivity. We put in a new load file (A00203010027) and it seemed to work fine for a couple of months. But we rebooted last weeked and all the old problems are back. The weird thing is that one of the fax machines still seems to be working??????? Doesn't make any sence to me.

If anyone else has any bright ideas? Please let me know.

thanks in advance

Christopher