Knowledge Base

SBS: Fax Server Is Unable to Properly Receive Faxes

Article ID: 246200

Article Last Modified on 11/19/2003

APPLIES TO

Microsoft BackOffice Small Business Server 4.0
Microsoft BackOffice Small Business Server 4.0a
Microsoft BackOffice Small Business Server 4.5

This article was previously published under Q246200

SYMPTOMS

When you try to use a Small Business Server (SBS) Fax server to receive faxes, faxes may randomly be received in an incomplete state. Also, the following entry may be added to the application event log:

Source: NT Fax
Event ID: 8218
Description: An error was encountered while receiving a fax. Please wait a minute and have the sender try again. If difficulties persist, please check that the following items are working: Phone line, Sending Fax Device, and Receiving Fax Device. If problems persist, contact product support.

CAUSE

This problem can occur because the fax server utilizes a T30 protocol for transmitting and receiving faxes. The T30 protocol is extremely time sensitive, and has several hard coded time-out values. If the fax threads that operate the T30 protocol do not run within a certain time period, the incoming fax may not be received, and may generate a timeout error message. Microsoft Windows NT Server is not a real-time operating system. There is no way to guarantee that a thread will run within a specified time slice. The fax threads may be preempted by other threads running on the computer and cause a timeout failure on the received fax.

RESOLUTION

To try to work around this problem, increase the performance of the server by increasing the CPU speed or by off-loading some of the server services and functions to other computers or servers.

STATUS

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in BackOffice Small Business Server.

Additional query words: smallbiz sbs

Keywords: kberrmsg kbprb KB246200

Microsoft KB Archive/246200

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