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The NetCFax client is a surprisingly
versatile (and complex) piece of software that by design has to be
able to provide full faxing functionality to your networked PC' in
a variety of different Windows environments.
To allow it to do this, it can be
configured to run under -
1 - A normal, (single
user) style PC running Windows 98, Windows ME or Windows
2000 Pro.
2 - On an XP Pro system
that has Fast Task Switching (FTS) enabled, or even one
that provides Remote Desktop Session (RDP) support.
3 - On a Windows 2000 or
2003 Server (Most usually running as a Domain controller of some
form) supporting multiple RDP sessions.
For case 1 above, this is pretty
straightforward, and you will usually install the client without
checking the Domains or RDP support options. In this
case, the Fax client's caption bar will contain [LOCAL MACHINE
SYSTEM].
For cases 2 and 3 above, this can
be less straightforward, as you will usually install the client
and checking either/or the Domains and/or RDP support
options. In these cases, the Fax client's caption bar will
usually contain [REMOTE DESKTOP SESSION].
When the caption says [LOCAL
MACHINE SYSTEM] you can normally start multiple instances of
that single installed fax client on that same machine if you wish
to do so. This lets you have fax clients running on your
desktop or syst5me tray at one and the same time that are perhaps
connected and logged into different fax servers.
When the caption says [REMOTE
DESKTOP SESSION] you cannot start multiple instances of that
single installed fax client in the same RDP Session.
You can however have multiple RDP sessions provided by the
Windows Server that are being run on different computers across
your network, and all of these will be running the same single fax
client installation (they are actually running it entirely on the
Windows server machine). This lets the same fax client be used by
multiple people at one and the same time, but each will be running
it with their own personal configuration settings etc, almost as
if it was installed on their own personal PC.
By default, the NetCFax client
uses what is called a dynamically assigned TCP port to receive
various notifications from the fax server they are logged
into. This is a very effective way to handle this on most
networks, but it is essential that is does so if you are running the NetCFax
client on an FTS system, or under RDP sessions, as all of these
clients when running have the exact same IP address, which is the
IP address of the PC the installation is on. Therefore, if
they are to received these notifications, the port must be
different for each running instance, and then all is well.
Otherwise, these notifications will not be received by many of the
client instances.
This can be further complicated
by the quite understandable requirement on some networks that only
a limited number of (tightly specified) TCP ports are used (or
opened and made available) for all communications between the fax
server and the fax clients. The NetCFax client can even
support this requirement as well, as it is quite easy to configure
the client to use a fixed TCP port for all server notifications if
you really need to do so. However, in that
scenario, you cannot run multiple instances on any of the machines
for the reasons described above, so this is only a valid situation
where the fax client is installed on each and every networked
client PC, which is usually the case when that type of Port
restriction is used.
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