Dear Users... (A thread for Sysadmin, Technical Support, and Help Desk people)

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zooterkin said:
Yes, you either use an MFP (multi-function printer) with a phone line, or a fax gateway on your email server.
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Yes, but how many places still have those, and if they do unless they're already in use do they have an avaliable line? We didn't have either the last time I was on the infrastructure side, and that was over ten years ago. (Actually I think we still had an old fax machine gathering dust 'just in case').

I wasn't saying it was impossible btw. Just pointing out that there's more to it than just enabling the application because you need to receive a fax.
 
We have a few customers who only accept faxed invoices. I have no idea why, since they do everything else via email.
 
DallasDad said:
We have a few customers who only accept faxed invoices. I have no idea why, since they do everything else via email.
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This has probably been mentioned already but there are outdated laws that recognize faxes as legal documents but not e-mails. Signatures, in particular, can be faxed but not e-mailed. Laws haven't caught up yet and some people overreact to the laws by requiring faxes "to be on the safe side".
 
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JoeMorgue said:
- "But I'm old..." SHUT UP! It's 2018. Computers have been common in office environments since the late 70s/ early 80s and totally ubiquitous since the mid-90s or so. You're 40 not 110. Unless you're a Highlander the math on the whole "But I'm toooooo old to learn computers" excuse just doesn't add up..
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A colleague tells me that in a previous job (large, now-defunct, multinational technology company and defence contractor) some of the managers were dinosaurs - one even had a secretary to actually type for him (in the late 1990s). When his secretary was made redundant, the manager realised he should actually learn what his password was.

It was "bastard"
 
plague311 said:
That reminds me of all the fun we have at work with the phonetic alphabet. We work with a TON of counties\state\federal locations, including police. We have a few counties that we dink with the officers. "X as in xylophone", "p as in pterodactyl".

We have stickers like yours too that we stick in the most obvious places. People with laptops looking on the bottom and it's right next to the keyboard.
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I have fun like that with one of my Ex coast guard coworkers. When he reads tool names to me (they have a 3 letter classification prefix), it was always Alpha, Bravo, Charlie ect.... Me reading to him it's Acetaminophen, Bethesda, Copenhagen .... whatever crazy word that comes to my mind at the time and, hopefully, never the same word for the same letter twice. So a tool with a BBD prefix might be read, by me, as Bartholomew Baccarat Disestablishmentarianism. His response was usually, "OK, you type the shift log and I'll read off the error list."
 
The Man said:
plague311 said:
That reminds me of all the fun we have at work with the phonetic alphabet. We work with a TON of counties\state\federal locations, including police. We have a few counties that we dink with the officers. "X as in xylophone", "p as in pterodactyl".

We have stickers like yours too that we stick in the most obvious places. People with laptops looking on the bottom and it's right next to the keyboard.
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I have fun like that with one of my Ex coast guard coworkers. When he reads tool names to me (they have a 3 letter classification prefix), it was always Alpha, Bravo, Charlie ect.... Me reading to him it's Acetaminophen, Bethesda, Copenhagen .... whatever crazy word that comes to my mind at the time and, hopefully, never the same word for the same letter twice. So a tool with a BBD prefix might be read, by me, as Bartholomew Baccarat Disestablishmentarianism. His response was usually, "OK, you type the shift log and I'll read off the error list."
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In a previous job I had a colleague who would do that unintentionally. Hearing him mumble "k for knight" on the phone was more amusing than it should have been.
 
jimbob said:
In a previous job I had a colleague who would do that unintentionally. Hearing him mumble "k for knight" on the phone was more amusing than it should have been.
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Yeah, on the phone if I say "B" and the other person goes "D"? I say something like "No B, for Better not put D".
 
As I understand it, fax connections require analogue phone lines, because of the "talking noise" technology especially for the initial handshake protocol. But most phone systems in businesses are digital if not IP-based. So the handshake for fax usually gets lost in the initial link setup phase. In short, they simply don't work out-of-the-box on digital systems.

There are ways around this but they are "special". Usually the simplest approach is to get separate analogue lines kept or installed, relegating the technology to being trapped in the last century. So there you go.

As an aside, the most interesting use of fax I have seen was in a Japanese restaurant some time ago. The orders were taken and written out up front of house, and faxed by a direct line to the kitchen which I suspect was in another building nearby.
 
Norman Alexander said:
As I understand it, fax connections require analogue phone lines, because of the "talking noise" technology especially for the initial handshake protocol. But most phone systems in businesses are digital if not IP-based. So the handshake for fax usually gets lost in the initial link setup phase. In short, they simply don't work out-of-the-box on digital systems.

There are ways around this but they are "special". Usually the simplest approach is to get separate analogue lines kept or installed, relegating the technology to being trapped in the last century. So there you go.
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They do work just fine on a digital line, it just requires a different configuration on the port than for voice. Compression off, gain set lower, error correction off, I think a frequency cutoff set higher than for voice. Boils down to selecting "Fax" in the Metaswitch configuration screen, if I remember right. I'm not in the CO, so I don't do the configuration myself, I just write the service order and it gets changed in about 3 minutes.
 
Yalius said:
They do work just fine on a digital line, it just requires a different configuration on the port than for voice. Compression off, gain set lower, error correction off, I think a frequency cutoff set higher than for voice. Boils down to selecting "Fax" in the Metaswitch configuration screen, if I remember right. I'm not in the CO, so I don't do the configuration myself, I just write the service order and it gets changed in about 3 minutes.
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OK for outbound faxes. Our telecoms guy says this doesn't always work in all situations for incoming. Some incoming fax machines are not capable of operating reliably through that environment. Also, there's sometimes delays in digital systems when connecting calls that cause issues with fax timeouts ("Your call is important to us..."). All in all, they tell me that trying to get fax lines set up in a digital system is a lot of work besides the line parameters. Usually easier to assign one of our old analogue lines instead. They do work more reliably.

(The other thing they tell us is "Why can't your customer just email like the rest of the civilised world?")
 
Yeah trying to send a traditional fax these days, when trying to get practically any call from any number to any other number that doesn't go through some digital process at some point in the process is damn near impossible, always seems to be a lot more hit or miss than we keep getting told it should be.
 
One of my coworkers had some language 'lost' going to China. The carrier (insurance or airline) insisted on faxed documents of the contents. We tried a few times with fax capable printer/scanner and phone line, with even the handshake sounding like it was accepted one time but just got timeouts. He eventually got it faxed out at the plant terminal/copy room.
 
Wow. I just found/worked out that we have two people with the same first and surname working in the same section. One's brand new, and the other's on mat leave, but she'll be back when the first is still there.

That's going to get confusing.
 
arthwollipot said:
Wow. I just found/worked out that we have two people with the same first and surname working in the same section. One's brand new, and the other's on mat leave, but she'll be back when the first is still there.

That's going to get confusing.
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Years back when the global bank I worked for was starting to use Lotus Notes I found my team lead and another guy had the same relatively common first and last names(say Jim Roberts) and no middle names. So to "avoid confusion" they set my team lead's short id to jimrogers and the other to JimRoberts. I suggested to them that as they currently had over 200k employees the odds of hiring a Jim Rogers in the future were non-zero. And that people trying to email Jim Roberts seeing jimrogers meant they often sent mail to the wrong guy. And some of that could be sensitive stuff.
 
Wudang said:
arthwollipot said:
Wow. I just found/worked out that we have two people with the same first and surname working in the same section. One's brand new, and the other's on mat leave, but she'll be back when the first is still there.

That's going to get confusing.
Click to expand...

Years back when the global bank I worked for was starting to use Lotus Notes I found my team lead and another guy had the same relatively common first and last names(say Jim Roberts) and no middle names. So to "avoid confusion" they set my team lead's short id to jimrogers and the other to JimRoberts. I suggested to them that as they currently had over 200k employees the odds of hiring a Jim Rogers in the future were non-zero. And that people trying to email Jim Roberts seeing jimrogers meant they often sent mail to the wrong guy. And some of that could be sensitive stuff.
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Yep had that here, two guys same first and last name though one works for the plant parent company and the other worked for ours (we're sub-contractors). Our guy just retired. At one point I think we had four Kevins and three Dans, though with different last names and the Dans had preferences as Dan, Danny and Daniel. So the only problem was the cacophony of Kevins.
 
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