The current binary does not work with FreeBSD 7…not even with 6 anymore because of a gettext library bump. I contacted UPEK a while ago, had an conversation with one of the guys there. I was even given a beta driver that worked, but then our communication seemed to halt.

I was just about to send them another mail when I stumbled on fprint, a GPL based fingerprint abstraction layer that includes reversed engineered drivers for the UPEK devices. The drivers live in user land and the USB bus is accessed through libusb which already is ported to FreeBSD. So, getting a more stable support for fingerprint devices than the binary-only UPEK drivers should only be a matter of porting this library to FreeBSD.

Woho…no more BioAPI-hell (worst. library. ever.). I’m not yet motivated enough to do a port myself, maybe if I get some more free time.

Update: Apparently they did a release, but two people have reported problems with Undefined symbol “GuiCallback”.  I’ll take a look and see if I’m able to use it. At least the beta driver I was given worked, but I never tested it together with the PAM module.

I’ve been hacking on a driver for Option GlobeSurfer iCON 7.2 S HSDPA/3G USB cards (and more or less all newer Option cards) for a few days now and I just reached a major milestone. A successful connection!

The driver is called hso for now (same name as the linux driver). The card is not a “normal” 3G-modem in the sense that it’s not simply a serial-over-USB card. Instead it has several serial channels that accept the normal AT interface (signal strength, SMS, etc) and in addition to that a IP packet interface to which one reads and writes raw IP packets. The card is exposed through a simulated Ethernet device. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve released a new version of my pam_bsdbioapi package (glues together BioAPI modules and PAM to allow biometric login, such as fingerprints). The new version, 1.5.1, is only a minor update that merge some of the third party patches from the FreeBSD ports tree into the code base. People using it through FreeBSD ports (everybody?) shouldn’t notice any difference.

pam_bsdbioapi download page

Yep, mdnsd speaks now, actually it has been able to do that for a couple of weeks but I just got probing and announcing working as I wanted it to.
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It’s been way too long since I wrote something here, but no writing does not equal no coding

I’ve finished of several quite large subsystems in mdnsd, including the cache and the record database (which is used for self-claimed records). This means that it’s able to receive and cache records, and able to read self-claimed records off a configuration file and add them to its database. Read the rest of this entry »