Tracking a stolen Laptop

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.