Fax not working since purchasing Fax Pro

Commercial Modules
1

I have two different trunks with two different providers.

The one provider never really worked. I only ever got faxes to that DID when it was sent from another phone system, not a regular fax machine.

The other provider (voip.ms) worked fine all the time for incoming faxes. I bought FaxPro about a week ago and now it doesn’t work for incoming or outgoing.

I get the following when trying to receive a fax to my Voip.ms DID
Status: FAILED
The call dropped prematurely

I get this error when trying to send out a fax.
Status: Unknown error (Originate failed)
On: freepbx
For extension: 200

Does anyone know how to specify which trunk that FaxPro uses to send out faxes?

2

It uses whatever trunk matches the first outbound route for the originating fax number.

3

In your FreePBX GUI visit settings> FAX Configuration.

On that page you will see a setting called Global Prefix, This is where you can define a prefix for all outbound faxes to dial.  You will want to match this prefix with a prefix on your desired outbound route.  Matching these settings will ensure your calls go out the correct route, while keeping your users from having to know anything about your outbound routes.

4

As far as inbound faxes now failing with Fax Pro. Fax Pro has nothing to do with inbound faxes and does not touch them. So if your inbound is failing then its something else causing the issue.

5

faxPro definitely is not the best choice for a enterprise. If you have to send few fax a day it’s ok, otherwise you’ll see your employees losing a lot of time with this unreliable system.
I’m very unsatisfied with fax pro and after one month of headache we had bought other solution from other vendor.

  1. with fax pro your employ lose time to guess if the fax is actually sent or not. the green popup indicate the fax state often hangs.
    n) if your employees try to browse in the web user pane during the fax sending, the web page hangs.
    n) you can send only to one recipient at time!!!
    n) be aware that some old fax don’t like your foip solution, but I think that this issue is related to asterisk and not to freepbx.
6

We are already rewriting Fax Pro at this time. it will be much better in the newest version

7
  1. the latest versions provide notifications via email of fax status
  2. a message tells you to please wait while your message is being sent
  3. yes this is correct it is not designed to be a broadcast fax solution, and with fax spamming being an issue I doubt this will be added, you can easily forward already sent faxes
  4. or an issue with old fax machines, even analog machine to analog machine faxes have a significant failure rate
8

Hello Cinzia,

I personally, as a user of FAX Pro, don’t agree with your conclusions.

FreePBX Developers answered to your statements point by point yet but I, as user, want to add some personal thoughts too because, exactly during these days, I’m comparing for a medium size company the FAX Pro with other priced commercial solutions.

At first we must always start comparing similar systems with similar features in similar scenarios (similar users/tasks): I mean you can’t compare “A” with “B” if “A” was engineered/created/though to be used in a small/medium size “general purpose” company rather than, as example, in a company providing call/contact centre services (this is the case in which, as example, mass outgoing FAXes campaign could be a mandatory feature and a primary user request/necessity) or in a very large enterprise (with thousands of users).

More we should also look at “A” and “B” products cost’s differences: would be interesting to know how much it was in your case…did you compared the cost of FAX Pro Commercial Module - the FreePBX Distro itself has almost no cost, sigh! - with your other vendor’s implemented solution: hundreds of USD/EURO or what?

There are FAX Server appliances (not software modules) that cost thousands of EURO (here in Europe where I am) and those appliances are dedicated to FAX only, eventually to cellular SMS management too (basically: e-Mail to FAX, FAX to e-Mail, Microsoft Lync connector, Bulk FAXes sending for campaigns, etc.): it’s clear that the more feature they have the more they will cost.

Turning back to FAX Pro module, the only feature which I really feel it lacks now, apart from cosmetics GUI refinements, is the ability to access the (Asterisk) system’s Phone Book (that should provide recipient’s FAX numbers too) directly from User Portal so users shouldn’t necessarily remember recipient’s FAX numbers to sent outgoing FAXes; by the way, as I recall well, that feature is going to be implemented soon with the new FAX Pro and User Portal.

9

It was not my intention to offend anyone. I have a great respect for the programmers working on the project and on FreePBX modules. However, I believe that the “fax pro” module is not up to the others.
I do not know if you’ve ever tested “fax pro” in an enterprise, but I have encountered a number of difficulties and an extremely negative feedback from employees.
I have 28 branche offices that need to transmit fax and my goal was to abandon the old fax machines cutting costs through FoIP.
I state that I am the only one person working in the IT department. I have to take care of a rather complex infrastructure and I have an absolute need of solutions that operate with little or no maintenance, however with “FAX PRO” I received constant calls because the web page for the fax transmission was blocked too often. (2) I perfectly understood well that I have to wait for the fax to be sent before to make any new task in user panel, but it is virtually impossible that all employees do not make this mistake.
(1) As you say, “Fax Pro” communicates the status of the fax transmission by email, and this is a useful function, but in my opinion, we need a more reliable system that indicates the status of the fax directly into the web page. So it is not necessary to open 2 programs (outlook and fax pro) to send only one fax.
I’m sure the next version will be much more reliable and will allow us to work in a less stressful manner.
Best regards.

10

It was not my intention to offend anyone. I have a great respect for the programmers working on the project and on FreePBX modules. However, I believe that the “fax pro” module is not as good as the others modules.
I do not know if you’ve ever tested “fax pro” in an enterprise, but I have encountered a number of difficulties and an extremely negative feedback from employees.
I have 28 branche offices that need to transmit fax and my goal was to abandon the old fax machines cutting costs through FoIP.
I state that I am the only one person working in the IT department. I have to take care of a rather complex infrastructure and I have an absolute need of solutions that operate with little or no maintenance, however with “FAX PRO” I received constant calls because the web page for the fax transmission was blocked too often. (2) I perfectly understood well that I have to wait for the fax to be sent before to make any new task in user panel, but it is virtually impossible that all employees do not make this mistake.
(1) As you say, “Fax Pro” communicates the status of the fax transmission by email, and this is a useful function, but in my opinion, we need a more reliable system that indicates the status of the fax directly into the web page. So it is not necessary to open 2 programs (outlook and fax pro) to send only one fax.
I’m sure the next version will be much more reliable and will allow us to work in a less stressful manner.
Best regards.

11

No worries. You did not offend Anyone. Feedback is great and it’s great to hear about your concerns. We will take them into consideration in the next version of Fax Pro

12

You didn’t offend anyone.

Once you explained your tasks and goals (quoted):

“I have 28 branch offices that need to transmit fax and my goal was to abandon the old fax machines cutting costs through FoIP. I state that I am the only one person working in the IT department. I have to take care of a rather complex infrastructure and I have an absolute need of solutions that operate with little or no maintenance”

it was quite clear that you hadn’t time (nor internal IT resources) to get involved into this particular FreePBX Commercial Module development (I write that from a FreePBX user/FreePBX Administrator perspectives).

Said so it’s also evident that you wasn’t ready to improve the FAX Pro module by issuing new specific tickets (just to ask for one or more new features/improvements) or by just signalling new software bugs you eventually discovered during the its deployment.

It’s also clear now why you discarded the FAX Pro solution: it’s because, among your various other specific requirements (Mass FAXing, as example), there was a most stringent one, the one we can generally summarize with this statement/approach to problem solving:

“I’ve no time to investigate, the solution I need should work as I expect in no time with no issue at all, if it doesn’t I must discard it and look for another one, no matter the price I’ll pay for, I need it works as I want”.

It’s impossible to not agree with this vision once you explained your scenario.

Without your personal involvement (that requires your time, your user’s patience), improving such solution will last longer but, in the end, that solution will be improved in any case because other users will ask about new features or will find some time to open new Tickets or will speak (write) to Developers about solution’s improvement.

It’s a matter of to be (or not to be) part of something and try to find time to be actively part of that.

IMHO it’s not that FAX Pro is not generically an “Enterprise Ready” module (remember: it’s just a little part of larger software solution involving FreePBX Distro), it’s that probably your specific deployment wasn’t ready (or right) for FAX Pro deployment.

Couldn’t be that?

13

I added a global prefix of 5 and created a new outbound route with the same prefix. Now, I have to get my users to put a 5 before the fax number. I keep getting “The call dropped prematurely”

14

incoming faxes are working now on one of the trunks. The other trunk doesn’t work but that’s an issues with the provider.

15

pls, when you think to release this new version?

16

It will be later this year as part of the new User Control Panel in FreePBX 12.

17

thanks for answer. Hope the migration from 2.11 to 2.12 will be simple :slight_smile:
best regards

18

I have some issue in sending fax with fax pro.
In my scenario I have only one sip trunk and I’d like to enable all my extensions to send and receive fax from web interface.
In trunk configuration I enabled T38 and alaw codec only.
It seems that inbound fax works well, but the outgoing fax often fails.
Where can I found a good guide to correctly configure fax pro?
thanks in advance

19

This is not a fax pro issue. Fax Pro has nothing to do with setting up how Asterisk sends a fax.

All Fax Pro does is take the file you upload convert it to a postcript and send it to res_fax inside Asterisk.

Does your carrier support outbound T38? Have you traced the call to see if its going out t38? Where does it fail?

20

Thanks for answer
At this time, T38 Pass-Through is enabled only in advanced sip settings, and in trunk configuration I enabled only the alaw codec (I live in europe).
I’m not using t38 capable devices. I’m simply trying to send fax directly from the fax pro web interface and for this reason I did not enable the t38gateway in extension nor in outbound route.
The result is, as I said, that I can receive fax from every old fax machine, but not all the fax is sent correctly, expecially from some old fax device.

May you help me to debug the outbound fax call?
In asterisk CLI “asterisk -vvvvr” gives me to much log and I don’t understand how to get only logs related to outbound faxing.

thanks in advance