Lev Lazinskiy

Using a SmartCard of CAC with Ubuntu

update 6/2/2024: this was imported from a blog I kept on the University of Cincinnati home page service that they offered to students. Its’ been removed now, how rude, but lucky for me the web archive captured a single snapshot.

Since joining the reserves I’ve unwillingly become an expert at using a CAC on the big three operating systems. Mac OS X 10.8 ML, Windows 7, and Ubuntu 12.04. One of the best resources for using the CAC on Ubuntu is this article which is a part of the community knowledge base. Using a CAC at home seems to be a pain in the ass no matter which OS you are using. But surprisingly, I have found Mac OS X to be the easiest to setup and most compatible using CACKey, Windows 7 works “ok” with the built in Windows Security Software, and Ubuntu works just fine using the previously linked article.

I was also able to use EID Authenticate with Win 7 to log on to my laptop using a CAC which was pretty neat. I have not found any comparable software for Mac and the workaround listed above for gnome I have not tried yet.

One really weird thing that was happening at home (I am suspecting some sort of weird router issue) is that many websites like NKO would not load at all on Windows no matter what browser I was using, but at the same time worked just fine on Mac and Ubuntu. I found that a shoddy workaround was to login to my schools VPN, but even that was not fool-proof.

As far as browsers, Chrome works best on Win 7, Safari works great on Mac, and Firefox works well on Ubuntu. However I the same cannot be said in any other order based on my experience. If you are having any issues getting your CAC to work at home let me know in the comments and maybe we can work it out!