smart card can't be seen by mac os x guest

[socratis]

Forgot to say here that I didn't even know if your device was a USB3 one or not, because on OSX there seems to be a problem identifying them correctly... https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/16022

[oldmacdude]

well, I spoke too soon.
Not about you being a genius. That's a nice tidbit of info to remember.
It worked right up until I rebooted the VM. I really have to learn not to celebrate until after I reboot. You'd think after 30 years of doing this, I'd figure that out

different error message now, which may not be the VM any more. Could just be 10.12.

Thanks again
John

[socratis]

different error message now, which may not be the VM any more. Could just be 10.12.

Well, are you going to leave us hanging there? What's the error message? Does it come from the guest? What does System Information on the guest say about the controller and the card in the USB section?

[oldmacdude]

Its a USB 2 device. Might even be USB 1.

And I'm back to the same error 229. Weird. It makes no sense that it would work the first time the change was made and then fail on subsequent tests.

[oldmacdude]

Now this is weird.
Today, I fired it up again, waited for it to boot, logged in, plugged in the card reader, and then plugged in the smartcard and it worked.
Took the card out to use it on the host OS, and then plugged it back into the reader that's captured by the guest OS, and it didn't work.
shut down the guest OS, removed the reader, and did it all again, and it worked again. Tried it a third time, just so I could be relatively sure that the procedure was to shut down the guest OS, remove the reader from USB, boot the guest OS, plug the reader back in, and then it works. And it did.
Once I was satisfied that I had a method to reliably read the card, then I need to move onto the testing for which this whole mess started.
I logged out on the guest OS and logged back in with the test account, expecting to see the smartcard and begin working with it. No luck. Card wasn't seen. As a non-privileged account, the test account doesn't see the logs, so I couldn't verify that the 229 error was what was happening. Logged back in with the admin account. The card wasn't being read, but no errors were showing up in the logs either.
Go back to the basics: shut down the system, remove the reader, start the system, plug the reader in. only this time, I'm back to the 229 error.

There were absolutely no configuration changes between when it doesn't work and when it does work.

I'll try again tomorrow. Maybe it only works on Wednesday mornings when the moon is near full.

[socratis]

I logged out on the guest OS and logged back in with the test account

Have you setup shared VMs? Otherwise the VMs are really "personal", and it has absolutely nothing to do with being with an administrator or not. User A cannot see user B's VMs. So, did you specifically set it up so that the VMs are shared? How? Exact details please, because it's not easy or meant to.

[oldmacdude]

I didn't put that quite right.
In the guest MacOS, I have an admin user account and a test mobile account. The CAC has only been seen in the admin account, and that only after following your instructions (and only sporadically at that).

Thank you,
John

[oldmacdude]

Well. we've got some improvement. Its no longer sporadic. Now it appears to be failing to read the smart card every time on the guest OS.

[socratis]

With no details on what fails at what point, there are limitations on what we can diagnose. Unless you ship it over to me

[oldmacdude]

That would certainly make it easier for me

I appreciate the help though. it's definitely a strange issue.

Thanks again
John

[oldmacdude]

I know that there may be nothing that can be done (without shipping the machine over, of course:-)
but at least I can chronicle our attempts.
I've definitely verified to my satisfaction that the issue must be something with Virtualbox. We were able to export the VM from our VMWare trial to Virtualbox. While that VM had no issue reading the card in the reader under VMWare, it was unable to do so under Virtualbox.

Not sure where to look now.

Thanks
John

[odoylefm]

I just wanted to add that I was experiencing a similar issue. Host = MacOS Sierra 10.12.2, Guest = MacOS Sierra 10.12.2. The System Version under the General tab for the Guest is Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan. The Guest OS saw the card reader, which was configured via USB Filter, but never the smart card. The Host OS had no issues with either the card reader nor the smart card. Once I changed the Guest USB setting to USB 3.0 (xHCI), everything worked. And it has consistently worked, even after reboots (or shutdowns and power ons).

VirtualBox version is 5.1.10.