FW: Production Server

[Eric "Shubes"]

Kevin wrote:
> A friend asked me the following questions, but I have no experience in this
> area.  I would like to collect some PLUG input and send it back to him.
> 
> Any takers?
> 
> ...Kevin 
> 
> 
> ------ Forwarded Message
> Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 08:21:29 -0400
> Subject: Production Server
> 
> Kevin,
> 
> I have some work related questions and thought you might know.
> 
> We need to replace our elderly fax server here at work and have looked at
> several solutions.  We have found a couple people that sell ready to go fax
> servers that are Linux servers with fax modems and HylaFAX.  They are
> basically charging for the hardware and setup service since it is entirely
> open source... like i-fax.com.
> 
> My questions are:
> Do you know if this is a good open source solution? 

Yes, and yes it is. ;)
I have hylafax server. It works very well.

> Is there a better one?

Not to my knowledge.

> We use 4 lines (2 incoming and and 2 outgoing) and send about 500 faxes a
> day.

The only thing to be wary of is the type of modem and it's configuration 
(Class 1 operation is better than Class 2). I presume the vendor will have 
figured all that out.

> For a production server, is CentOS or Fedora better?

CentOS. More stable, fewer updates.

> Do you know of anyone able to setup a server of our own like this and
> willing to reliably support it (for a fee of course) if we had a problem I
> couldn't solve?

I'd be happy to.

> Thank you very much.  Take care!
> Greg

There is one consideration I didn't see asked about, and that's fax client 
software. There are several options. Hylafax is very flexible, but does not 
include a fax client (of any significance). For windoze clients, I use 
Cypheus. I don't have any linux clients at this time. Greg needs to 
determine what his client requirements are, if/how faxes will be routed, 
etc. Simply printing them is a slam dunk, but there is so much more that 
hylafax can do, like routing to email addresses and such.

-- 
-Eric 'shubes'