Jeff’s Blog

The University of Washington has released a free and open source system for tracking computers called Adeona.  I have installed it on my work laptop and it gets the job done.  This is a great solution for home users as it works on Linux, Mac, and PC and doesn’t require anything else from the user as far as a server or service fee to use it.  There are some defiant short comings though. 

• First as with all non BIOS tracking software this won’t work if a thief wipes the drive without booting up.
• Second it sends the location data pseudo randomly every half hour, so if a thief boots a laptop and sees a login screen and shuts it down, it probably won’t be recorded.
• Third would be a nightmare to mass deploy.  I have thousands of computers I would want to install this on.  To do this I would have to manually install it on everyone since it asks questions during the install and you have to copy a file to a central server that you have to have to check on the location data.
• Fourth it uses OpenDHT to store the location information.  I don’t trust the stability of an open source distributed storage system that anyone can use for distributed storage.  Its only a matter of time before this starts to be used to distribute illegal material or the popularity of it cripples it.  I am all for open access to things but time and time again a few people always ruin it.

For my purposes I think it would be better just to write a program that posts the computer name and IP address to web server that stores the information in a MySQL database.