Day: June 27, 2019

We run into a lot of older iron and because of that we find fax cards and Facsimile Support installed every now and again. The question that stumps almost everyone is “do you still use fax?”

That question usually results in someone checking the physical machine to see if there’s a cable plugged into the fax card. No cable? No fax. That’s easy!

But if there’s a cable plugged into the card it’s usually a guessing game for the customer.

An easy way to determine if you’re using fax support is to check file QAFFTLOG in QUSRSYS. This file will contain all fax transactions the system has ever done.

You just need to query the file. Fields QFDATE and QFTIME contain the date and time respectively of each fax transmission.

If file QAFFTLOG isn’t found then good news. You’ve never had fax support installed.

A simple script to find your fax history in descending order would be:

select * from qusrsys.qafftlog order by qfdate desc;

The top row of your result set will show you the last fax transmission. If it’s a recent transmission then you’re still actively running fax. It’s great info to have when configuring a POWER9.