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Protecting My Daughter's Notebook?
ctwxman asks: "My daughter enters college in the fall. This past week she spent three days on campus for orientation... and had her iPod stolen! That got me to thinking about protecting her brand new laptop. I'll physically lock it to something immovable -- that's simple. However, I've got a website and it's got a log. Is there a way to make her laptop quietly 'phone home' every time it boots so I can get the IP address and always see where it is? Her machine runs XP, but knowing Slashdot, suggestions for all OSes will be appreciated."
You can't prevent theft, and you might not be able to track it down.
But, you *can* get a rider on your insurance that will cover theft of the laptop.
That, and backups of whatever term paper she's currently working on kept in a separate place, is what you need.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
Since you asked about something that would phone home I would suggest Timbuktu from Netopia. There was a story a few years ago about how a brother recovered his sister's stolen computer by using its phone home functionality.
Bad Panda! No Bamboo for you! In matters of importance ACs will not be responded to. Want to say something critical,OK
There's no curl in Windows, but there IS FTP.That should do the trick - you just need to have a script that it autolaunches that has "GET
Heck, you don't even need to program.
Get a copy of Wget for windows and put it in the startup group with the address of your web site, like so...
wget http:/// mysite.com/laptop.htm
that should hit your site and download the file whenever the system is booted.
For more fun, use Srvany and run the little script above as a service. This way the crooks don't even need to login for it to work.
start/all programs/accessories/system tools/scheduled tasks
alternatively, you can install cygwin and cron as a service; it works well for me
Most of the posts I see so far are offtopic, insulting, and unhelpful. The guy asked for a tech solution, we're tech people! Help him out. I had a laptop stolen from my dorm a couple years ago, it sucked. I say just write a nice little program that hides itself and gives you a remote shell. Then have it 'phone home' just by updating its IP with a free dynamic dns service. When you need to get into the box, just ssh to the hostname. Call up the school and tell them the IP/MAC, and they will be able to help you if it is on the campus network. Avoid 'locking down' the box, as this will just encourage the theif to format the drive before you have a chance to find it (which he may do anyway). Perhaps other /.ers can elaborate. Good luck!
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Kim Komando has a reference to several companies that do what you ask.
Dear Kim: I bought my son a laptop. Is there a way it can be tracked if it is stolen?
Dear Reader: Yes. There is software that works over the Internet to report the location of a stolen laptop. When a thief connects the laptop to the Internet, the software reports its location to a special Web site. CyberAngel (www.sentryinc.com, $60 annually), CompuTracePlus (www.computrace. com, $50 annually) and zTrace (www. ztrace.com, $50 annually) are three companies that offer laptop locator software and services.
For MACs you might also try LapCop which emails you when the computer "disappears."
In addition, as literally anything could be on the drive, encrypt it. The translation slowdown will be barely noticeable and will save you if your child decided to put your VISA card in plain text files. Also, while a hardware password may seem like a great idea, if someone does steal the machine, it will never call home because they cannot get past the password.
I would then add a real easy to use laptop lock. If it is hard to use, it will not be used. No one wants to try and grab eight books from the library while lugging around their laptop. So they set it down for "just a minute."
Finally, for the "team her to be responsible" crowd: a college is about the least secure environment to which we will ever expose ourselves. People are free to come and go in most dorms, doors are secure as your least responsible roommate. College is also where more growing up occurs. Lighten up.
(a command that sucks to use, by the way)
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
What's all this poppycock about phone home software and remote logins and thin clients? This is rather simple...
1a. Buy a MicroSaver with guaranteed replacement from Kensington. As long as you file police report in X number of hours, Kensington will give you up to $1500 of the total cost if it was stolen while on the lock. Make sure she uses it. If it's on her desk, it's tethered.
1a corollary. When she's out, the dorm is locked.
1b. When it's not on her dorm desk, it is either in her hands, on a table or in front of her, or within arms reach. No exceptions. No "I just left it for a minute".
2. As another poster said, make it identifiable easily. Put a ton of stickers on it. Get your dremel out and carve in a name, address, phone number, and mention of reward.
3. Write down serial #s and MAC addresses, keep them on file. Report them to all the nessecary authorities if it's stolen. This includes the campus IT staff - when it comes to finding it by MAC address they can be your best friends. Unlike trying to trace an IP address over the net, they should be able to track the laptop to a physical location quickly if it's plugged into the campus network.
4. Backup. Backup. Backup. Nuff said.
5. If you're really paranoid, get a proximity alarm. Small device attaches to laptop, other device attaches to daughter. She goes too far, it goes off and draws attention.
...and that's all there is to it.
Or you can download it here...
http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/
http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/
A lot of the other *nix tools are there too...
First, I'd try to find a programmer, because this is going to take a little bit of coding. I'm going to give you a sort of spec; you can hire a starving college kid to hook this up for you on the cheap. OK? Here goes:
1. Locate a simple, downloadable SMTP library. You want this to be something that can be used within a piece of software to generate and send an email. VB, for example, has a Sendmail.dll file you can download somewhere, with a simple interface for creating and sending email. It's worth googling for (I don't remember it offhand).
2. Have your coder write some code that gets back the results of ipconfig (is it still called ipconfig on XP? I think that's the one for Windows 2000) and stuffs it in the body of an email. That'll give you what you need. Make sure the email also contains a timestamp, because you'll want to see who had that IP address at that time.
3. If you want to get really fancy, you can have your developer use whois (if the system has that; have to check) to find out who owns the subnet the laptop is on. That'll tell you whether its her university or a private ISP. If you can find a whois server on the web that'll let you do an automated check, that'll work too, just open a brief http connection. Netsol won't do it; they make you enter text from an image every time. Grumble...
4. You want the program to run very quietly without output on startup. You'll want to call it something innocuous, like SYSverCHK.exe, something people will figure is system related.
That's all I can think of off the top of my head... Good luck!
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
Once trick I have for my own laptop is I carry it around in a bag that doesn't look like a laptop bag.
Putting it in a laptop bag is equivalent wearing a neon sign that says "I have a laptop. Please steal it." Especially if it has the manufacturer on the site just to clear any doubts any potential thief has about the contents.
Some better ideas are:
- Get a briefcase and fill it with foam padding
- There are laptop rucksacks you can get, which are less obvious
The best thing to do would be to make sure that the MAC address of every single networking device in the system is written down where you can find it and again where she can find it (and registered with the university if they offer). The university knows its own network and has managed networking hardware so if you can provide the MAC address of the system, they can monitor it and know exactly what port it is connected to (or hotspot it is in). It is simple from that point to send in the campus police to knock on the door of Room 302 of McThiefy Hall. The added bonus of this plan is that it still works when the first thing done to it is a reformat.
Thats the best I can provide (as another student entering the class of 2009) so I hope it isnt hidden to deep in the comments to be seen.
Bottles.