Aside from the fact that this is a prototype for a commercial / government project and I've been slightly less than pleasantly surprised by GemPlus' response to my queries (that is, they do not respond to my queries.) We would like to consider all vendors for the reader portion, but if after three months of phone calls they still don't respond, I've got to conclude that they're not interested in my business. Of course, if there is a GemPlus salesperson on this list who is interested in getting in touch, please send me some email.
At this point in the project, I need to move forward with acquiring a set of readers that will support my prototype development effort. ActivCard does have a list of compatible readers, but I figured I would ask here to see if there is anyone with first hand experience using CAC cards with some version of muscle under SuSE or RedHat. My motivation is to buy readers that can work under both Wintel and *nix environments. I unfortunately do not have time right now to aide in the debugging effort of the GCR410/415 drivers. It may seem like a bit of a crass approach to take with an open-source project, but I view it as a commercial project supporting suppliers who support open-source projects. From what I've been able to see based on my current and past experiences with GemPlus, they are less than forthcoming with product marketing or technical information. It is my guess that it is this lack of open technical information about their readers that makes it difficult for me to have a good out of the box experience with a GemPlus reader. This is a simple message to vendors, there are a number of developers like me... We build prototypes using systems with which we are familiar and with which we feel we have a safe bet that the API's won't be pulled out from underneath us. For me, that's Linux. We deploy on systems that have been selected for different criteria (like the ability to flawlessly run Word and Excel.) For our organization, that's WinNT with a sprinkling of MacOS X boxes. Vendors who support development environments under both environments will most likely get preferential treatment from solutions providers. I've seen Schlumberger CryptoFlex and I think it was a CyberFlex work with a Datakey reader. I thought I would get recommendations from people who were currently using CAC cards before banging my head against the wall trying to figure out what is the problem with the GCR415. The symptoms are that the reader + card stops responding to protocol after about 140 bytes of transmitted data. This seems to occur both with muscle/linux and activcard/wintel. It's very puzzling. -----Original Message----- From: Jean-Luc Giraud To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: 2/27/2003 7:56 PM Subject: Re: [Muscle] CAC Card + MUSCLE : Recommendations for readers ... On Thursday, Feb 27, 2003, at 20:51 Etc/GMT, Hamrick, Matt wrote: > We're running SuSE 8.1 with the 1.1.1 PCSC Lite RPM > installed. The only reader we had around was a GCR 415, which seems to > be a > little less than optimally supported. Could you be more specific about what you mean by "a little less than optimally supported"? Is it a performance issue? Is it an installation issue? Reliability issue? All of them and even more? We could try to address it... > Anyone out there have experience with a setup like this? Should we > ditch the > GCR 415 and get a real reader? I have heard of people using the GemPC41x family as well as the GemPC430 successfully with CAC cards. I am sure most modern readers from any manufacturer would work as well. However, I don't see why they would qualify more as "real readers" than the 415 (shape of the case? Color ?:)). > Anyone working with CAC + Linux/muscle AND > Wintel/Activcard? I'd like to avoid interop issues WRT poorly supported > readers... The GemPC family is officially supported by Gemplus on Wintel, so you should be able to use it (as long as the Activcard SW uses PCSC to communicate with the card). Maybe you should ask directly to Activcard what they recommend as a real reader. Cheers, JLuc. _______________________________________________ Muscle mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.musclecard.com/mailman/listinfo/muscle _______________________________________________ Muscle mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.musclecard.com/mailman/listinfo/muscle
