Reference10:Concept Faxserver: Difference between revisions

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* [[Howto:Configure_Faxserver_to_accept_SMTP_without_authentication | Howto: Configure Faxserver to accept SMTP without authentication]]
* [[Howto:Configure_Faxserver_to_accept_SMTP_without_authentication | Howto: Configure Faxserver to accept SMTP without authentication]]
* [[Howto:Department fax with Faxserver application and MS Exchange | Howto: Department fax with Faxserver application and MS Exchange]]
* [[Howto:Department fax with Faxserver application and MS Exchange | Howto: Department fax with Faxserver application and MS Exchange]]
* [[Support:Low_contrast_source_documents_results_in_low_quality_fax_on_faxserver | Support: Quality settings for contrast adjustment]]


[[Category:Concept|Faxserver]]
[[Category:Concept|Faxserver]]

Revision as of 13:04, 12 July 2017

The innovaphone Fax application provides an email-to-fax and fax-to-email gateway.

The application polls an internal mailbox for arriving emails which are converted to a fax document and sent by an innovaphone FAX interface. Content in the email can be plain text, HTML, PDF files and all other files which can be converted by OpenOffice to PDF. The sent document includes a cover page if configured. The recipient's fax number is taken from the email address and defined as fax number@fax server domain. To send an email to the internal mailbox, authenticated SMTP with the configured user and password must be used.

Incoming fax documents are converted to a PDF file and forwarded to the first email address configured for the user in the PBX.

Requirements

  • It is needed to have the innovaphone Linux Application Platform installed and running.
  • Each user which is allowed to send and receive fax documents has got at least one email address and the fax license in the PBX.
  • If multiple emails are set in the User Object the first email of the list will be used to receive incoming Fax and User it's allowed to do outgoing Fax from any of his emails that are listed in the User Object.
  • A mail server which supports authenticated SMTP or version V10 SR13 or later of the Fax server application.
  • Fax destinations must support T.38 (or there must be an interconnect gateway supporting T.38 in-between) or the device with the FAX interface is V11r1 or later and supports the Audio Fax feature.

Installation

Download the latest version of the innovaphone Fax application.

Log into the Linux Application Platform, go to the Applications tag, click on Upload/Update and upload the downloaded file. The installation will start automatically and the page will refresh every two seconds showing the installation process. If there is no error during the installation you will see at the end "Installation was successful". Otherwise, you will get "installation failed" and the reason why it went wrong.

Hotfix

If you have already installed the latest version of the fax application, simply download the install_incremental_faxserver_xxxx.tar.gz file for your platform (VM or IPxx10) or if you have missed some hotfixes, download the install_cumulative_faxserver_xxxx.tar.gz archive which contains all hotfixes since the final version.

Upload this hotfix archive here.

Configuration

The innovaphone fax solution consists of the Linux application and several parts of an innovaphone device: a PBX SOAP login, a PBX gateway object, the gateway FAX interface and an route to an external line.

Faxserver Application

Configuration of the PBX

The following configuration changes are done in the gateway running innovaphone PBX.

License

It is required to have Fax licenses installed on your device. Check under Reference10:General/License if you already have one. An user fax license is necessary for each PBX user with fax rights. Set the Fax license flag for each PBX user object on the objects properties page which should be allowed to send or receive fax documents.

PBX TAPI Login

It is required to have a PBX object which can be used for SOAP login. This object must have at least group CF rights and a set password. It and the fax gateway object must be in the same group and the group active flag must be set for this object.

PBX Gateway Object

It is required to have a PBX gateway object the FAX interface can register to. The prefix option should be enabled. The object must be a member of the tapi group.


Configuration of the Gateway with FAX Interface

The following configuration changes are done in the gateway hosting the FAX Interface (could be on the same Gateway running the PBX).

FAX Interface

Register the FAX interface to the PBX gateway object with the enabled T.38 option.

WebDAV Access

If the fax server WebDAV path should not have public access or force HTTPS is enabled, the authentication of the fax server WebDAV URL must be configured for the device HTTP Client and the innovaphone-linux certificate must be trusted. The innovaphone-linux certificate is in the untrusted certificates list not before the first access to the WebDAV server by the FAX interface if a fax document should be sent.

innovaphone Linux Application Platform

The following configurations are part of the innovaphone Linux Application Platform.

Public Webdav access

If the fax server URL/user/password is not configured in your device as authenticated URL, configure faxserver/ as public Webdav path with write access on the innovaphone application platform Public Webdav Paths.

Server Configuration

  • Active: Tick if this server should be started.
  • Server Name: A freely selectable name for this new server instance.
  • Description: A freely selectable description for this new server instance.
  • Language: The default language for this fax server.
  • Cover: The cover file which is used to send a cover page by this fax server.
  • Trace: If ticked, the FAX interface trace on the innovaphone device is enabled.
  • For an other user language or cover file of a specific slave PBX such a configuration can be added with a PBX name configuration line.

Mail Configuration

The fax server includes an email server. To send emails to the fax server SMTP authorization must be used with the configurable user and password.

  • User: The user for the SMTP authorization. It must be unique for all fax servers.
  • Password: The password for the SMTP authorization.
  • Fax Server Domain: Incoming mails are checked against this domain and outgoing mails use it for the sender domain.
  • Administrator Mail Address: The administrator mail address for error notification mails.
  • SAP support: If ticked, a SAP compatible result code is appended in the response mail which can be interpreted by external applications.

If a SMTP relay host should be used for the outgoing fax server mails, the relay host can be configured with the relay hosts configuration. If the same fax server domain is shared by several fax server configurations, only one relay host can be configured for it. Each fax server configuration with a different fax server domain needs an own relay host entry in the Linux AP relay host configuration and the fax server domain must match with the sender domain field of the relay host entry.

PBX Configuration

It is necessary to add a normal PBX user with at least CF/group rights and set password to use it for the SOAP login. The user must be in the same group as the fax gateway object and the group active flag must be set. To check the Fax license for users in slave PBX it is also required the SOAP login is available in all slave PBX.

  • PBX IP address: The PBX IP address for the SOAP connection.
  • Port: The port for the SOAP connection.
  • Dyn-PBX-Id: An Id if a dyn-PBX is used.
  • User: The user name for the SOAP login.
  • Password: The user password for the SOAP login.
  • HTTPS: Tick if HTTPS instead of HTTP is to use.
  • Fax User: The long name of the PBX gateway object.
  • Linux NAT IP address: The IP address of a NAT router between the Linux AP and the PBX if a NAT is present.
  • Linux NAT port: The forwarded port of a NAT router between the Linux AP and the PBX if the default port isn't used.
  • WebDAV URL: This WebDAV URL must be used as authenticated URL in the PBX HTTP client.

Fax Configuration

  • Subscriber Id: The subscriber Id of the T.30 protocol, which will be sent with a fax.
  • Add User Number: If ticked, the user number is appended to the subscriber id. See also Howto:Faxserver Number Plan.
  • User Number Prefix: If all user numbers begin with a common prefix and the personal fax numbers are to be shortened with this prefix, it's to be configured here. This feature doesn't work with node numbers.
  • Subscriber Name: The subscriber name which will be printed within the header line of each fax page.
  • Alternative Subscriber Id: An alternative subscriber Id of the T.30 protocol, which will be used with a Number Map PBX object. See also Howto:Faxserver Number Plan.
  • Max Call Tries: The maximum number a call tries, if a call is not successful.
  • Resend Delay: Delay in minutes after which a fax is resend.
  • Response Timeout: The timeout in seconds within the remote party has to response.
  • Retry Timeout: The timeout in minutes within it's tried to get a free channel for the call.
  • File format of forwarded fax document: The file format of the forwarded incoming fax document.
  • Cover page includes user's text: If ticked, the content of the user mail is included in the cover page. Otherwise the complete content is ignored.
  • Confirmation with sent document: If ticked, the response about a successful delivered fax includes the complete sent fax as PDF document.
  • Modem speed: The supported modem class can be changed if necessary.

Texts

Customer specific texts can be configured language dependently here. The texts are used for the email correspondence with the users. The defined variables in the user texts are described in Howto: Faxserver User Text Variables.

Covers

Own cover files can be uploaded, downloaded or deleted here. Once uploaded the cover file can be chosen within the server configuration. Only unused files can be deleted. See Howto:Create Faxserver Cover Sheets for how to create your own cover.

Authorized Hosts

The fax server accepts mails with authenticated SMTP. If SMTP Auth isn't available, it is also possible to authorize a host with his IP address configured here. Normally a incoming mail is delivered by the SMTP Auth login. If SMTP Auth isn't used, the mail is delivered by the domain. So it isn't possible to use the same fax server domain in more than one fax server configuration.

Database

The Fax application creates the innovaphone-faxserver database to store the configuration and the fax job data. PostgreSQL is also available for other applications and any of them could create its own database. The default password is faxserver. It may be changed at the innovaphone Fax page under Config/Database.

There are tools that allow to connect to application databases remotely. It is first needed to configure the IP you are connecting from under Config/Database at the innovaphone Fax page. For the PgAdmin III it is important to use innovaphone-faxserver as service DB. The default login credentials are for the user innovaphone-faxserver with the password faxserver.

Backup and Restore

You can both manually and automatically backup the database and configuration files for the Fax application under Administration/Backup in the application platform.

Configuration details for the update server can be found here.

Configuration Files

saveinnovaphone-faxservercfgs is the command used to automatically save the cover page files with the Command File. Other configuration files needn't not be saved because the configuration of the innovaphone Fax is in the fax database.

Data

saveinnovaphone-faxserverdb is the command to automatically backup the whole fax database with the Command File. The fax database also includes the fax configuration, but not the cover page files.

Logs

saveinnovaphone-faxserverlogs to save log files with the Command File.

Appendix

Tools

NetDrive

NetDrive is a useful webdav client which can be used to access webdav of the innovaphone Linux Application Platform.

PGAdmin

PGAdmin is an administration tool for PostgreSQL databases.

Putty

Putty is SSH client to connect to the Linux Application Platform.


Known Limitations

Concurrent fax calls

The number of simultaneous fax calls is limited by different factors.

FAX Interface Channels

The number of supported fax channels on the gateway is the first of them, that will limit the calls.

Refer to the wiki article about implement large PBXs to find out the number of FAX Interface channels available on a particular innovaphone Gateway.

The number of FAX Interface channels on an IPVA is not limited by the software, but by the amount of RAM assigned to the virtual machine with IPVA. E.g. the default RAM value of 64 MB will allow to serve up to 60 fax channels on a single IPVA instance. More Fax channels could cause unexpected out of memory restart (trap) of the IPVA. To increase the number Fax channels on the IPVA, increase the RAM assigned to the VM, but consider the CPU load (e.g. on a 2,6 GHz CPU ca. 200 calls will cause 100% CPU load).

Faxserver Application

The number of simultaneous Fax calls that can be handled by the Faxserver Application are limited by 90. This number of calls can be reached on an IP-Linux instance hosted on VMWare VM with at least with 1,5 GB RAM and a 2,6 GHz CPU.

Documents with large number of pages

  • Sending fax documents with large number of pages requires more memory, this could lead to problems if the maximum memory it's reached. The PHP5 configuration have a limitation of 128MB by default that can be found under etc/php5/cgi/php.ini File there is a line saying:
; Maximum amount of memory a script may consume (128MB)
; http://php.net/memory-limit [^]
memory_limit = 128M

Sending fax with 200 pages or more can be enough to reach this limit, in such case we should increase the memory_limit value. Also the RAM of the Linux machine in case we are using Vmware Virtual Machine.

Incoming Fax received with many pages

- Large incoming faxes are split in files with maximum 30 pages to prevent mail sending errors (ie: attachment too large), this feature it was implemented on fax10sr14.

Troubleshooting

Faxserver Database

  • Part of the diagnostics of the Faxserver application at Diagnostics->Calls Section we can list the calls that were done List Database Calls and the ongoing calls List Running Calls with a time/date filter. This information it's useful to check the failed fax calls (incoming or outgoing) and check the Error cause.
  • Some Error Codes:
    • user error: no fax recipients - TBD
    • bad connection: error correction aborted, max. tries - TBD

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