Open source system for swipe card access?

Posted by Moduspwnens on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Moduspwnens
Published on 2011-12-19T15:02:15Z Indexed on 2012/09/08 9:40 UTC
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We're looking at replacing our campus-wide magnetic swipe card system with something more robust. The "programmer" side of me says there's got to be an open-source, scalable solution that already does this, but all I've been able to find are proprietary vendor-specific solutions.

Ideally, it'd have the following:

  • Based on some open standard that allows us to select from a wide selection of card readers (like IMAP or HTTP)
  • Support different kinds of card access (magnetic strip, RFIDs, etc.)
  • Future-proof (to the extent possible)

The lack of information I'm finding leads me to believe I'm not searching for the right things... or such a solution doesn't exist. Is there not some basic, open-source solution to this (like MySQL for databases, or Moodle for an LMS, or Apache for a web server)?

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