HPC Cannot Send Faxes

As you know by now, This blog is my personal dairy of small business issues and trouble shooting travails. As expected something will happen and it did. Yesterday I had a call from my wife that the faxes are not going through since morning. First thing that came to my mind was that it must be Vonage platform. Since I have a vonage phone that is linked to the main incoming calls 630-378-4480.

Problem: The faxes were not going out, I checked if there was dial tone, and there was none. I tried connecting the phone to the vonage output and that did not work.(Still not sure why that did not work) Any way rebooted the Vonage device, rebooted the NetGear Router, Rebooted the PC, and the Phone as well as the fax machine. None of these worked.

Situation: The wire was firmly in the socket (but the wrong one), from the wall socket the wire was going to the fax machine, and the fax machine was going to the 4 line telephone device. The 630-378-4481 is the fax line that is coming in along with the DSL service from AT&T. In fact this is also the line that we redirect to the RingCentral service so all faxes get converted into a PDF and come into the Google mailbox of HPCBolingbrook.

Solution:
See the image at left the white panel has two sockets, one of them is empty. That should not be used. The second one is the DSL line with two outlets one for phone and other for DSL. The phone jack should go to the phone socket and the other end ends into the fax machine. And from the FAX to the 4 line phone device.

Root Cause: There were three kids that our front office person brought into the office as it was columbus day. Since the kids were playing in the front office one of them must have removed the wire by mistake or knocked it off the socket. For fixing outgoing fax issues please refer to the picture at left.

Venkat Reddy