Why not use ddclient in conjunction with www.dyndns.com or similar free service? It keeps track of the ip address obtained by your laptop. Tim
That could certainly be one way of implementing the tracking. Maybe someone wants to wrap things up in a nice package? --liw
Lars,
there are two possible reasons why a laptop would get stolen:
- Identity Theft / Fraud / Blackmailing / Espionage, and
- Because the machine would be sold (or kept).
In case one, a clever thief would unmount / disassemble the hard disk (and probably dump the rest), and explore it with the use of another machine. No chance to ever find or catch him/her.
In case two, the first thing a clever thief would do is reinstalling.
If there's any chance to ever find that machine again, then it is because of its MAC address (if that ethernet nic is used again), and even this would be almost impossible if it's used behind a router.
So I'm afraid to really make it difficult or impossible to steal and go unpunished, we have to think of other ways than to implement something like phoning home...
cheers, wjl
wjl, obviously "phone home" isn't a complete solution to laptop theft. It is, however, a very cheap trick, and it might help, and in a number of cases it already has helped. In the world of security tradeoffs, it seems to me to be worthwhile.
Phoning home is certainly possible to bypass, or disable, but I'm pretty sure your average laptop thief is about as sophisticated as your average car thief: not very. The goal with this isn't to make theft impossible or to guarantee recovery of stolen property, but to increase the likelihood of recovery.
There's no point in not doing anything just because what you might not be perfect. --liw
As for the issue of your webhost using a previously-signed file to wipe your computer, just have the laptop check the time on the signature and only act if it's outside some threshold, such as a day or a few hours.
However, a possibly more difficult issue is that of network connectivity. You either need Linux to try to connect to any WAP in range or rely on the culprit plugging in to a network.
--Chris