Technical information

INSTALLATION AND ADMINISTRATION GUIDE
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There are two config entries which control this behavior, both are in the $VSIFAX/lib/vsisrv.ini file, in the
VSINET section:
image-server = <name> Hostname or IP address of the image server. Default is no image server is defined.
image-server-delay = <secs> The number of seconds between pings of the image server if it is detected to be
down. Default is 60 seconds.
Checking the conversion possibilities
Once the Linux/Unix server has been configured to use a Windows Imaging server, you can verify that those two
servers are able to communicate properly.
You can issue a vinfo -D -v filetypes command on the Unix/Linux server and verify that you get the result
from the Windows imaging server with the conversion paths for the Microsoft Office documents.
If this command does not list the appropriate conversion paths, you can verify that the server name defined in the
vsisrv.ini file is correct and you can also verify that the 2996 port used for the communication between the servers is
open.
Using the add-on formatters
There is a known issue with the imaging servers and the add-on formatters: the Unix/Linux server will not be able to
use these add-on formatters for a conversion. They do not appear in the conversion path list when doing a vinfo
command.
Problem
The Windows imaging server has the add-on formatters installed and can convert the doc or xls files correctly with a
vfx -o command line. However, when doing the same command from the Unix/Linux server, the resulting .tif file
has hundreds of garbage characters pages. This happens because the mstotif converter is actually used and the
Word document is converted using an inappropriate application.
Solution
To workaround this problem, you can either install Microsoft Office on the Windows server or the Office Viewers
(freely available on the Microsoft Website). Then, you need to associate the application with the file type and the
conversion will be done with mstotif using an appropriate Windows application to open and print the document on the
VSI-FAX server printer. (external formatter used).