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A question regarding Fax Machine model code in the NSF Frame

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Shubh Jain
2015-09-04
2015-09-04
  • Shubh Jain

    Shubh Jain - 2015-09-04

    Consider a situation where a particular Fax machine has been discontinued by the company.
    In this case, can the NSF Frame segment that represented that particular model's identification code be assigned to a new model?
    In short, can a model identification code inside an NSF frame be assigned to a new model?

     
  • Lee Howard

    Lee Howard - 2015-09-04

    In the NSF frame everything after the manufacturer identification is proprietary to the manufacturer. So, the truth is that the model identification that HylaFAX attempts to make is in error unless the developer who added that identification to the HylaFAX code knew that proprietary information from the manufacturer. As far as I am aware no HylaFAX developer was ever privy to that kind of information from any manufacturer.

    Therefore, the "model identification" that you see from HylaFAX is merely a guess based on some developer sometime in the past seeing that frame data come from a particular fax machine model. If the manufacturer re-used that same frame data from the NSF with other models then HylaFAX will make a "model identification" in error.

    In the past I have considered removing all model identification from the HylaFAX NSF processing code. However, I decided to leave it in for what little value it provides. However, I am of an increasing opinion that it actually provides no value whatsoever and is misleading more than anything.

    The only information that HylaFAX can glean for-certain from NSF is the manufacturer (and even that may be a bit uncertain due to bit-order differences) except for from other HylaFAX systems where we know how we encoded the simple information that we did. We also have a relatively good expectation that our "station id" interpretation is correct, simply because it's a long string of printable characters... stands to reason that it's programmable text. Everything else, including model identification, is speculative at best.

     

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