Requeueing faxes with HylaFAX

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 Kill time expired. In such cases these fax messages need to be requeued after the underlying problem has been fixed.

According to the documentation faxalter is the program to use. The manpage tells to use -r to requeue a fax and mentions the need to alter the kill time with -k 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.

However, this does not seem to be sufficient. You'll also need -a 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.

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 -A parameter is needed as well.

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

   faxalter -A -a now -k now+5hours -v -r ID

The ID is taken from the output of faxstat -d|sort. 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 hosts.hfaxd.

As a bonus using -d 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.