Gemalpto Smart Card Reader only appears as "Shared" not "Passthrough"

[eurgain]

Hi

I have a Win7 guest hosted on WS11.  I have tried the same VM using an OpenSUSE 13.2 and Ubuntu 14.10 host to the same (dead) end.

PROBLEM: I have a Gemalto PC Twin USB Smart Card reader attached to the host that I need t have passed through to the guest.  All the documentation seems to suggest that two devices should appear in the "Removable Devices" menu - one for the reader in shared mode and one for the reader in pass-through mode.  However, I only ever see the shared reader, which appears to the guest as a generic card reader, rather than the sepcific Gemalto reader that I need the guest to see.

I have added the line

usb.ccid.useSharedMode = "FALSE"

to /etc/vmware/config, but this makes no difference.

It does not seem to matter whether pcscd is running on the host or not - the result is the same.

I really do not know where to start - I have spent hours searching to try to resolve this, but to no avail.  Any help would be much appreciated.

Alistair

[wjwj]

Hi, thanks for reporting the issue. 'Passthrough' mode was disabled on Linux host. You can use 'Shared'. Good luck.

[eurgain]

Hi, wjwj

Thanks for the information.

Unfortunately, I cannot use "shared".  This news is a total show-stopper for me!  I will just continue with Oracle Virtualbox, which is nowhere near as nice as VS11, but at least it works!

Alistair

[wjwj]

Thank you, Alistair, for reporting this issue. We've had a defect tracking it internally.

[admin]

Hi Eurgain,

You can manually enable passthrough mode. The reason why the passthrough mode was disabled was because we were stepping toes with a service called pcscd service that is required for the shared mode to work. However if you do not want to use the shared mode, you can manually disable shared mode and enable the passthrough mode

Here are the steps:

Shutdown the VM to which you want to passthrough the smart card and:

1) Go to the VM's installation directory. Typically C:\Users\<username>\Documents\Virtual Machines\

2) Open <virtual-machine-name>.vmx file

3) Append the following lines:

      usb.generic.allowCCID = "TRUE"

       usb.ccid.disable = "TRUE"

4) Kill the process corresponding to the PCSC daemon on the Linux host

Do a # ps -ef | grep -i pcsc on your Linux host

       sudo kill -9 <pid of the process that corresponds to pcscd>

Notes:

1) The first line in step 3 enables the passthrough mode

2) The second line in step 3 disables shared mode

3) Since you are killing the pcscd on your host, you wont be able to use the smart card on the host. You can passthrough the smart card now and use it in the VM

Hope this helps,