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Dell D620 SmartCard Reader


doogie1303

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Hello All,

 

I just recently started playing with OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard on my Dell Latitude D620 and have configured everything fairly easily following the instructions (except if you are creating a USB install stick use myHack 3.1.2 instead, as 3.3.1 has a bug with creating 10.6).

 

I ran EDP after installation to fix some of the battery/sound issues and used software update to get to 10.6.8, everything is working pretty good. The only thing that isn't working is the Smartcard Reader, I've looked over the forum and haven't found anything about how to get it working.

 

The Smartcard reader appears to be an internal O2Micro USB smartcard reader. I've looked to see if any OSX drivers were ever written for O2Micro readers but I haven't found any yet.

 

So does anyone have any ideas on how to get the smartcard reader to work?

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Some people's companies use smartcards to authenticate for VPN or email purposes, and it especially used a lot in the millitary with Common Access Cards or CACs as they're called. Macs do support authenticating with smartcards, but usually you have to buy a smartcard reader that is "Mac Friendly", or what it really means is that the company wrote a driver to support OS X.

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Actually, some SmartCard readers work out of the box with OS X. The OP's reader should show up as an O2 Micro CCID reader. The CCID part means it's an industry standard reader that needs no additional drivers.
 
Well... almost no additional drivers. Military CAC users do need to install some middleware (e.g., CACkey) to deal with the certificates on the card. This is based on experience as I have connected to DoD sites using a D820 running Lion and only needed to install CACkey.

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Well I've had some luck with MacOSForge Smart Card Services, I installed their 10.6 version and was able to get Keychain to see my SmartCard and keys, that let me use Safari to login into certain DOD sites, but not all. A lot of the DOD sites are written specifically for IE so the websites don't always work well with Safari, even with the User Agent set to mimic IE.
 
link to the Smart Card Services wiki:
http://smartcardservices.macosforge.org/trac/wiki
 
I also looked at CACkey as that is needed for Firefox since it doesn't use Keychain access. I ran into problems with CACkey not seeing the smartcard reader correctly. This might be due to Smart Card Services, or it might be a 10.6 issue. I will try to uninstall Smart Card Services and reload CACkey only.

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