[clug-talk] FOSS Calling home solutions for laptops

[Gustin Johnson]

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Mark Carlson wrote:
> On 5/8/09, Peter Van den Wildenbergh <peter at meta-logica.com> wrote:
>>
>>  Hi List,
>>
>>
>>  Anybody aware of a good 'calling home' solution (FOSS on Windows and/or
>> Linux) for laptops?
>>
You could use dyndns.  Every time my laptop connects to the internet the
dyndns client updates the laptop's IP.

Of course in my case this is useless as I have full disk encryption
enabled, meaning that the OS will not boot until I provide a password to
"unlock" the hard drive.

It would also be pretty straightforward to write a script to keep a log
of what IPs it has, possibly a traceroute (to make it easier and faster
to track down), and to scp that log to a host somewhere using ssh keys.

Likely though, the first person to actually boot the laptop is going to
format the drive.

>>  Does this 'technology' actually work, anybody able to recover a stolen
>> laptop with this?
>>
I do not know of any success stories personally.  I do know lots of
people who have lost or had their laptops stolen.

It is trivial to bypass anyway, replace or wipe the hard drive and your
laptop is no longer phoning home.  This kind of technology needs to be
in the BIOS and it needs to be paired with GPS before it is really valuable.

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