My brother runs a small cooperative restaurant that does a lot of community work. A few months ago someone kicked in their door and stole their computer. They wrote it off as a fluke, but just last night someone kicked in their door AGAIN and stole their replacement. So now I'm making it my personal mission to find a way to catch the people, and we're willing to sacrifice a third computer to try and do it. I'm looking for ideas ... At the moment I'm leaning towards something like http://www.gpstracks.com/ . The phone home is an option (is there any software that already does this?) but someone could just reformat and get around it. Anyone have some clever ideas?

Hidden camera watching where the machine is.
Lojack?

How big is a lojack? I wonder if it would cause problems inside a computer.

I thought about the video camera thing, but if they just have a hooded sweatshirt on, they could steal it and we still wouldn't be much better off ... I feel like tracking/phone home/etc would be a better guarantee of finding them/the computer.

The thing is that it is probably being stripped for parts or reformatted as soon as it is being turned on. I doubt the thief would boot it all the way through to a login prompt or give it enough time for startup code to run. Even if they did, you would need to have some kind of cellular modem or wireless network to get around all of the physical wire / IP configuration issues.

Hmm... Cell modem... You would still need to have some kind of code to do a "phone home" with meaningful (i.e., GPS) data...

Sometimes one wishes for a Halon flooding system }:-<

But rigging such to a burglar alarm is probably illegal - and not really compatible to my own ethics anyway... but one can fantasize...

Agreed. You would just be sued for loss of potential income by the surviving family...

The phone home is an option (is there any software that already does this?) but someone could just reformat and get around it.

There's lots of companies and shareware authors offering 'phone home' solutions, but most of them are just a background program that is easily disabled. However these two claim to survive a reformat and reinstall by hiding themselves in odd places on the hard drive.

http://www.laptopretriever.com/
http://www.ztrace.com/

Unfortunately none of these companies seem keen on offering any real technical detail of how their system works, so it's difficult to know how true their claims are.

Phoenix have a system called TheftGuard that sits in the BIOS, but you'd have to buy a PC that supports it and it tends to be aimed at laptops.

And in all cases, you have to (a) assume the thief plugs it into a phone line, and (b) that having an IP address would even be remotely useful to you. Maybe their ISP won't help you locate them or something.

I say go low tech.

I think your low tech solution is to get a better door or a gate. Really. I'd wager the PC's are being traded for a fix.

-Zeke

I was thinking more along the lines of a piece of Louisville Maple.

Thieves tend to get my hackles up.

Dye Pack?

Have a laser tripline between the door and the computer. If the beam is broken, automatically slam shut steel bars covering the doors and windows. Then start playing taunting phrases over the loudspeakers...like "You're caged now you little rat", and "Kiss your cornhole goodbye, sucka...you're going to jail".

I was gonna say that baseball bats are made of ash, but it appears that Louisville Slugger is making maple bats. Hmmm.

Yep, and they're making a special Johnny Damon model that goes right through baseballs and comes out the other side intact, causing the bat to make a nice whooshing sound on every pitch that goes past.

-Zeke

Sox are making my hair grey.

ROFL