#include <infodrom.style>
#include <debian.style>

<page title="Debian Tips">

<h1 align=center>Requeueing faxes with HylaFAX</h1>

<p>Requeueing a fax with HylaFAX is not as easy as one would think.
When HylaFAX or the modem mysteriously fails some fax messages may get
past their particular kill time and are thusly moved into the done
queue qith the remark <code>Kill time expired</code>.  In such cases
these fax messages need to be requeued after the underlying problem
has been fixed.</p>

<p>According to the documentation <code>faxalter</code> is the
program to use.  The manpage tells to use <code>-r</code> to requeue a
fax and mentions the need to alter the kill time with <code>-k</code>
as well.  The kill time refers to the time when a fax should be
"killed" from the send queue, i.e. the moment until it has to be
transmitted to the receiver.</p>

<p>However, this does not seem to be sufficient.  You'll also need
<code>-a</code> to specify a date from which on HylaFAX should try to
deliver the fax.  You'll also need permission to requeue the fax.  It
may be possible to do so as the same user that has queued the fax in
the first place.</p>

<p>If the administrator notices such a failure they are often not the
originating user, thus a different user will try to requeue the fax
message.  Thus, the ADMIN user of HylaFAX is required for this
activity.  Therefore the <code>-A</code> parameter is needed as
well.</p>

<p>Time is specified in the same way as the at(1) utility, thus
<code>now</code> and <code>now+Xhours</code> works.  More difficulty
is applied since the order of command line parameters seems to be
significant for <code>faxalter</code>.  The command below has
parameters ordered properly:</p>

<p><pre>
   faxalter -A -a now -k now+5hours -v -r ID
</pre></p>

<p>The <code>ID</code> is taken from the output of <code>faxstat -d|sort</code>.
This command will ask for the ADMIN password which may not yet be
configured since it is optional.  It refers to the fourth field in the
HylaFAX configuration file <code>hosts.hfaxd</code>.</p>

<p>As a bonus using <code>-d</code> you can also alter the receiving
fax number for the requeued fax and thus send it to a different number
than originally.  Quite helpful for typoes.</p>

</page>

# Local variables:
# mode: indented-text
# end: