[K12OSN] Biometrics Reader for Schools

[John Lucas]

On Saturday 04 November 2006 00:41, Harish Pillay wrote:
> > Is there any bio-metric reader supported by Ltsp for finger print
> > identification?
> >
> > My school is planning to identify students and record their in/out-time
> > using finger print scanning. Presently, I have a LTSP client on 486 at
> > the security gates. All the vendors interviewed are providing Windows
> > only solutions.
>
> I do not have experience with it, but perhaps this URL would have
> enough info to help:
> http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_enable_the_fingerprint_reader
>

This seems to be specific to the integrated fingerprint scanner in the IBM 
Thinkpad laptop computer. Nice to know they have Linux support, but if 
biometrics are going to be used througout the enterprise, there has to be a 
central database and just getting a reader to scan is neccessary but not 
sufficient for the purpose. There is a lot of system integration (and 
expense) involved in such systems.

I would have serious cost/benefit questions if I were involved, particularly 
if one of those costs was to lock the school into a single computing platform 
in order to support it. What happens at upgrade time? If this is a 
single-purpose solution (campus entry/exit), then it would be less 
restrictive, but the benefit (single authoritative authentication source) 
would also be reduced.


-- 
        "History doesn't repeat itself; at best it rhymes."
                        - Mark Twain

| John Lucas                          MrJohnLucas at gmail.com               |
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