I’d be interested in more detail on how you’re powering them. If you’re now having to run power into the door just as we would for a powered hardwired lock, I don’t see how that saves much money. If this is some sort of retrofit, I’d be curious to know how you are doing it since that might solve one of our problems. Also, we were told repeatedly by Assa Abloy and their various VARs that the locks only talk to the access control system once per day so how are you overriding that?
I like the concept of wireless locks just fine, if they work and do what we need them to do in our environment. -- Ron Parker, Director of Information Technology, Brazosport College Voice: (979) 230-3480 FAX: (979) 230-3111 http://www.brazosport.edu, KE5RON From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Constituent Group Listserv [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Jake Snyder Sent: Thursday, July 02, 2015 3:45 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Wireless Door Locks We've been playing with the Assa Abloy locks. Currently we have them connected all the time to facilitate lockdown, and leverage a power jump to keep them powered all the time. Batteries are only in play if the power jump is without power. Different group dealing with that, but sounds promising. Down side is limited EAP support. Leap, peap and Eap-Ttls. And the config program is wonky. Thanks Jake Snyder [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> 208-286-3015 Sent from my iPhone On Jul 2, 2015, at 2:22 PM, Parker, Ron <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: I would strongly advise against these locks unless you fully understand their limitations and are OK with them. We did some construction projects where hard-wired locks were “value engineered” out of the project to save money. We ended up with a bunch of wireless Assa Abloy locks that don’t work right and that we can’t get support on. They have been nothing but headaches for us. Most of them don’t work anymore and we can’t find anyone in the Houston area that can support them. They are useless if you want to do a building lockdown for a security issue. They can’t be locked or unlocked remotely because they aren’t in constant contact with the access control system. Ours poll the access control system once per day in the middle of the night, that’s it. You can’t remove access to an area instantly by revoking a user’s card or access level. You have to wait for the update to happen that night or go to that lock (or locks) and manually trigger an update. The locks originally arrived with WEP security as the only available option. I rejected that and insisted they upgrade them to WPA2 or I would not allow them on the network. That was done but we ended up paying extra to have their controller modules changed out. We’ve learned the hard way that IT needs to insist on being at every possible construction and design meeting and to stay on top of these things all along the way or we end up with these kinds of messes dumped on us. We still got things dumped on us in spite of our best efforts but at least we tried. Do not trust architects or construction companies to do what makes sense in today’s IT world. They don’t understand our field any more than we understand theirs. -- Ron Parker, Director of Information Technology, Brazosport College Voice: (979) 230-3480 FAX: (979) 230-3111 http://www.brazosport.edu, KE5RON From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Constituent Group Listserv [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Derek Johnson Sent: Thursday, July 02, 2015 12:33 PM To: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Subject: [WIRELESS-LAN] Wireless Door Locks Our campus planners are looking to standardize & modernize lock systems across campus, and they're drooling over my worst nightmare wireless door locks that connect to our existing wifi network. 2.4GHz only, of course. I'm against this idea for too many reasons to list (technical & security-based), but I'm curious to hear perspectives from the community. Has anyone deployed or had to support a wifi-based door lock system? What's been your experience? On the flip side, have you successfully fended off a push for wireless door locks? If so, do tell... :) Thinking back to Lee's recent drone discussion... perhaps I can get administration interested in drone surveillance instead of wifi door locks. That's an idea I could get behind... Derek Johnson | Data Communications Coordinator FORT HAYS STATE UNIVERSITY 415 Lyman Dr. TH 101, Hays, KS 67601 (785) 628 - 5688 | [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/. ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/. ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
