Tracking a stolen Laptop

If the thief who stole your laptop connects it to the Internet, then this software will grab its IP and other coordinates and inform you

Saturday, November 01, 2008

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According to various surveys, 90% of laptops in India are stolen during travel. Worldwide, a laptop gets stolen every 12 seconds. These figures are obviously alarming, and will only go up as laptop sales increase. But then the good thing is that the IT industry doesn't leave any opportunity unexplored...so enter solutions that track stolen laptops. They provide a small ray of hope to those unfortunate souls who've lost their laptops. Some more good news is that if something is launched in the commercial world today, the Open Source world doesn't sit quietly for long either. So, there are both commercial and Open Source solutions to track stolen laptops, and Adeona is one such Open Source solution. It enables you to map out your stolen laptop. All you need to do is install this software on your laptop, and if your laptop gets stolen, wait for the thief to connect it to Internet. The software continuously monitors current the location of the laptop and sends updates to the Adeona server. These updates contain information such as, IP address of the laptop, nearby routers and name of the Wireless AP (if connected through a wireless connection). It uses OpenDHT storage service to store locations of your laptop sent by Adeona client. The laptop owner can retrieve an update from the last IP and contact the appropriate law enforcement agency with the details.

How to use?
Installing Adeona is easy. During installation it will ask for a password. Remember this password carefully as it will be required when you try to retrieve position of your laptop. Once installed Adeona will automatically start a background service. By default, the client sends update at randomly defined time, -usually an update every 30 mins. As the installation finishes it places an '.ost' file on the desktop. This is the file you will need, to determine the location of your laptop. It's recommended to backup up this file at a secure location away from your laptop, like on a CD or you can just email it to yourself.

Update results retrieved from Adeona server. Here it shows internal as well as external IP address of the laptop and name of the AP. It also shows details of nearby routers.

Now to determine the location of the laptop, you would need to run Adeona recovery tools. These tools are by default installed with the client, and can also be installed separately. Once you run this tool, it will ask for the '.ost' and password for the file. If authentication is successful, it will now connect to its server and try to retrieve the last IP address from which Adeona client had sent the update. Once it has retrieved the details, it will automatically save them on the desktop in a text file format. This will include the last IP address and names of nearby routers if available.

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