[Muscle] Remote connections to pcsc

[Paul Klissner]

Shawn Willden wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I have a situation where it would be convenient to have a card reader 
> connected to one machine, and the application using it running on another 
> machine.
>
> It occurred to me that if libpcsclite were to use a TCP socket rather than a 
> UNIX socket to connect to pcscd, this would be easy to accomplish.
>
> Has anyone tried this?
>
> Is the over-the-socket protocol platform-dependent?  Would there be any issues 
> with using a different platform on each end (OS/CPU)?
>
> I'm going to give it a try in the morning, but I thought it might be worth 
> seeing if anyone in the community has any thoughts/warnings.
>   
The project I'm working to make PCSClite scalable for thin clients is 
very far a long in the process
. It involves the option to configure PCSClist to use a TCP/IP socket as 
well as the option to select a
UNIX domain socket.   Using a TCP/IP socket works fine, but a scalable / 
secure solution
is a fair amount of work.   Currently we're not using the TCP/IP socket 
across physical machines
but across Solaris Zones (virtual machines) under Trusted Extensions 
(highly secure Solaris 10 option).

The socket operation is socket()/listen()/accept() on a well known port #.
The socket is created with SO_REUSEADDR, and SO_LINGER turned way down 
or off to
avoid various problems with sockets in TIME_WAIT, but the linger option 
is something that
may require some experimentation.

In the upcoming weeks we plan to integrate what we have into a branch of 
the PCSClite gate, 
and you'll be able to study the code at that point.  Currently the 
changes are adapted to Solaris,
and some work needs to be done to make it as platform-independent as the 
PCSClite 1.3.2
we adapted .  That is something we are also pursuing.

I'm currently in a bit of a time crunch so, I can't offer you much 
beyond this
at this point, except to say that it works.

Paul

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