Door Access Control System Goes Wrong at RustyBrick

We installed an access control system for our office like three or more years ago. Today, the system went bad. A device shorted and blew up, locking a few of the doors that device controlled. One of the rooms it locked was the main room where the RustyBrick programmers work in.

We tried a bunch of things to get it open, including:

• Accessing the software, did not work
• Unplugging the device, it ran off a back up
• Unplugging the back up, it was a fail-safe (meaning if everything goes off, they remain locked)
• Swapping out a good device for a bad one, but since we had to use one that was in use already, it didn’t work

In any event, Joe (RB Guy) and I was able to get that door open with a credit card – yea… I also called the company who installed it over to fix the problem, they did. They also did some routine maintenance on the system, while they were here.

To be honest, the system is incredibly old. It is one of those proprietary, old school, access control systems. I wonder if someone will create an open source equivalent. Like with PBX software, we now have an open source solution named Asterisk, we use it here and it is awesome. Would love an open source access control system.

We don’t use it for security. We use it for convenience. I hate carrying a dozen of keys around with me. I only need to cary one keychain to open all the doors in my office building. It is convenient, until it stops working.

Guess what, I do have backup keys for all the doors. But for some reason, that one door, the key doesn’t work. All the other doors work just fine. So I am out to replace that lock with a new one as soon as possible. Until then, that door remains open.