Hello

sorry if this is kind of a repetitive thread, but i'm having a hard time trying to find some biometrics for CentOS 5.2. Does anybody know of a good scanner/driver(centos) combo that is relatively easy to implement?

Thank you in advance

"find some biometrics"

You need to be more specific than that. What type of equipment are you looking for? Fingerprint scanner? Retina scanner? Iris scanner? Handprint scanner?

What is your intended application?

Firstly, from what I've seen, biometric authentication hardware with official Linux support is relatively uncommon, as most of the biometrics vendors buy into the idea of security-through-obscurity.

Secondly, is there a reason why you've decided you need a biometric authentication system? Keep in mind that many of the less expensive open fingerprint scanners can be fooled with some amount of skill, and can often be less secure than something like a SafeWord or RSA card. On the other hand, a really good biometric system protecting your bank vault might just convince an unauthorized party to start chopping fingers off until they're granted access...

First off, I'm looking for a fingerprint scanner.

I don't expect it to be free, but at the same time i'm trying to keep the cost under a fortune! haha

As far as specific brands and models, i'm pretty much open at this point (as long as it is quality hardware/software)

It will just be used for initial logins and possibly authentication after system goes into screen saver.

The reason I am looking is because our company is PCI compliant and we just had an audit. One of the things they mentioned was changing passwords every year (which we do even though they are very strong passwords), but he said we could get around it by using some sort of biometrics. We already use fingerprint scanners in all of our office PC's (xp and vista) so now we are looking for our data center. it just so happens that all of our racks have a mixture of windows and linux systems and I am trying to put something together (hopefully using kvm's) so that we can use one fingerprint scanner for an entire rack.
Now I am just trying to find a good fingerprint scanner setup that will work with both windows and linux.
Any help would be appreciated. Thanks

I amazed they let you go an entire year with one password. In most areas I work in they scream if they are not changed every quarter (at least). Here is a quick read (it is a little dated): http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to...erprint_reader

You also want to be aware that there are two distinct types of readers. One you press you finger on a square pad and it reads your entire print. The other you run your finger across. The first method has a security flaw in that you can use the last print on the pad (with a little help), assuming the pad is not wiped after each use(and it will not be).