Has anyone got any experience on using cards to do log in. I want to put a ( very ) cheap card reader in every machine and then give the students a credit card sized card that they stuff in the card reader to login ( If anyone has been to Las Vegas - like the slot cards )

It doesn't have to be mega secure ( since these are teenagers and they tell each other their password no matter what we say ) so just a mag strip is fine but ...

and here is the but... We are Windows XP at the moment so it would have to work with that until we switch to Linux next year.

Any ideas ??

thanks

Mal

Are you talking about magnetic cards, or smart cards?

I was thinking magnetic cards only because I imagined they would be cheaper
Smart cards seems overkill - The students will loose them by the handful anyway

ta

Mal

There are point-of-sales registers that run on Linux so I'm sure you will be able to locate devices that can work in both Windows and Linux. You might need to google a bit to find which PAM module that you want to use for authentication.

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Looking around on the net, it seems most devices use either a usb or serial port to interface to the computer. So interfacing with the device may not be a problem.

You might want to look at the opensc, open1x and xsupplicant documentation. Or maybe at pam_ldap information.

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https://www.opensc-project.org/files/doc/opensc.html
http://www.opensc-project.org/doc/pa...html#id2526624
http://pcsclite.alioth.debian.org/

I think if you want to use magnetic strips instead of smart cards, you may need to find a device that includes a driver that acts like a smart card reader supplying a PKCS certificate that a PAM module uses.

The sc reader model information may lead to links for magnetic readers & drivers that work.