What Electronic Door Lock Would You Buy?

zentigger asks: "I work for an ISP that supports internet in several dozen remote areas. Our POPs are typically fairly small shed-like structures, with a couple racks of equipment. For the most part, we can manage this stuff in-band, but frequently we need to have a local agent physically access the equipment for some minor maintenance work or adjustments. As time goes on, the shuffle of keys is becoming farcical and expensive. What we need is an electronic lock of some sort that can be reprogrammed remotely (preferably from a remote console via serial or directly via ethernet) that will stand up to extreme weather. Google certainly turns up lots of glossy brochures — although I don't see how they can -all- be 'The heaviest duty lock you can buy!' Does anyone have good experiences with any particular products or perhaps other means of dealing with the key shuffle?"

Comments

A GSA approved lock of course

[laing]

Sargent & Greenleaf are *THE* stanrdard when it comes to electronic locks. See here.

Bit o' Warning

[thesameguy]

A while back I did some consulting for a somewhat remote municipality, who was in your exact same situation. They had small "equipment sheds" located throughout the region, and were having problems maintaining physical access. Their solution was to invest in a bunch of programmable electronic combination locks that they could reprogram as people were fired and/or promoted and not have to go through the whole rekeying process. This created an entirely new problem: People forgetting access codes that changed every several months. These workers worked around the problem the only way they could: Prying open the doors with tools, breaking the doors and sometimes the locks in the process. This forward-thinking municipality ended up footing the bill for the lock retrofit, a bunch of broken doors, and ultimately a return to standard keyed locks. FYI, YMMV...

Only a door lock?

[Timesprout]

I have a complete electronic defense system for my home and I am currently upgrading the AI. It was slow going at first, the AI kept requesting to be given a name. Eventually i gave in and called it Skynet and things have been going quite well, although the Asimo I hooked up to it does like to chase me round the house a lot trying to taser me. I am going to ask one of my mates at the NSA if one of their global domination scenarios can connect and defeat it as a final acceptance test. Should be cool.