FIX: Archived faxes overwritten if more than 16,000 faxes per day

ZTN1145

ID: ZTN1145

This Zetafax technical note applies to:

• Zetafax 5.5 and later

Symptom

Under rare circumstances archived faxes can be overwritten with newer faxes, and attempting to view the original fax or its transmission history will display the newer fax instead.

This will happen if more than 16,000 messages are sent and/or received on a single day.  It will also occur if the date on the Zetafax server is changed, then changed back to the original date after at least one fax is sent or received.

Cause

Faxes that are received or submitted for sending are allocated a " message ID" - an 8-character identifier.  The Queue Manager program uses this ID as the name of the archive file.

While the message ID is generally unique, under the circumstances given above it is possible for a new message to re-use a message ID that had previously been allocated to another message.  In this case the archive file created for that message would have the same name as the one for the previous message, and would overwrite that older file.

Resolution

The Queue Manager program has been changed so that if the archive file is about to create already exists it uses a different file name (replacing the first character of the message ID with a letter).  This change is transparent to the user.

Users who send or receive more than 16000 messages per day, and archive them, will require this updated version.

Users should take care to set the date on the Zetafax server PC correctly.  If the date is set incorrectly the problem described above will only occur for the remainder of that day, and the archiving will work correctly again from the following day.  We do not recommend updating to this new version in this case.

Status

The problem is corrected with build 7.00.4.54 of the Queue Manager program, available on request from Equisys technical support.

Last updated: 10 July 2001 (GW/DH)