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Installing FAXmaker has always been pretty routine for me, except of course when I did it for myself. Now being a frugal kind of guy, I decided to make due with an antique (relatively speaking) HP Pavilion 7955 tower running XP Pro, and 512 MB RAM. There are essentially two methods of installing FAXmaker. One way if you are adding FAXmaker to an Active directory domain with Exchange, the other if you are in a peer to peer network called SMTP mode. Since FrugalBrothers is a SBS 2003 shop, I chose the former install. First I must confess, I had forgot to pre-install MS Outlook on the machine, This is necessary for conversion from TNEF to MIME. Once I installed Outlook and made a connection to the Exchange Server, I was ready to proceed.
I had copied the FAXmaker installer to the local disk from my network share. After running setup, FAXmaker asked me for an Administrators account to start the service. I next completed the setup wizard, making myself the FAXmaker administrator. One thing important to remember is to install IIS and SMTP services on the new fax server machine, unless you are installing it on an existing Exchange Server. I don't recommend that you do however. Faxing is resource intensive, especially if a lot of conversions are going on. Also if you are using a fax modem, remember to install windows fax services, so GFI can use the windows driver. I went another route and I'll explain why in a bit. I am waiting to purchase a new 4 port Quattro MainPine board in the next few months, so for the purposes of testing FAXmaker and putting it through its paces, I used the built in modem on the old Pavilion, a Lucent WinModem. The install wizard will attempt to identify the correct modem on its on, or if you are running the windows fax service, will automatically detect the windows drivers. I choose the windows driver. The installer runs a test, in which it tests the SMTP MTA, and the first time, It was successful and email a message to me saying so. I then opened the GFI Configuration tool and was greeted by and error message telling me that my configuration database was corrupt. The configuration file is an Access database, in the FAXmaker subdirectory. I checked permissions and they were ok. I tried a reinstall, but I got some new errors this time. First when using the windows fax drivers, I failed the MTA test, it just kept timing out. This time I chose, to use the GFI driver, and I passed the MTA test. When I launched the FAXmaker configuration, it opened without complaint. The next step is pretty straight forward, I needed to install the GFI connector on the SBS Server. Now I couldn't find this anywhere in the user manual, but you must make a change to the settings of the connector, and on the general tab, change the smarthost from the name of your Exchange Server to the FAXmaker SMT server (in brackets) Installing the client software gives you multiple options as well. You can choose an Outlook messaging only form, or the FAXmaker New Message form or a combination of both. I installed both on my workstation. After some configuration on the server side, I was ready to send a test fax. I fired up Outlook, selected a contact fax number and attached a word document. Nothing happened! after about an hour of troubleshooting, and even calling GFI support (it was late Friday, and I appreciate Ben at GFI helping me out) I still couldn't send a fax. The very last thing I tried was check windows firewall on the FAXmaker Server And enabled port 25, for inbound and outbound and all of a sudden my test faxes started going into queue, and FAXmaker was happily chugging away. I guess the hours I spent meditating paid off. |
