It is something we all fear; coming into the office in the morning to find out your workstation, or server, was stolen during the night. Or leaving your laptop unattended for mere seconds only to find out it’s disappeared. Apart from the costs of replacing your stolen computer hardware, there’s the company data that’s now out on the street. (You’ll be feeling a lot better if you encrypted that data though – we’ll be adding an article on the excellent Open Source encryption solution called TrueCrypt soon…)

Gone forever? It might be. But in case the thief does not immediately formats the hard-disk but instead uses the laptop or PC anywhere it’s connected to the internet, there’s a number of services that actually track and locate your stolen equipment, using IP addresses and more. There’s LocateMyLaptop, LocateLaptop, and so on (read the WikiPedia article on this). Trouble with all these, is that they are subscription (and European/US) based.

For some time though, there’s been a free alternative; giving you all the functionality of the above minus the dedicated detective and automatic notification of the police. Living in Tanzania though, these services are not available to us anyway, so why not try ‘Prey’, the free, Open Source application available to Windows, Mac and Linux users that installs once and then runs quietly in the background, until it’s needed.

The Prey website

If that day arrives, your laptop or desktop computer has gone missing, all you have to do is enter your Prey Control Panel and set it’s status to ‘Missing’. From then on, every time the PC or laptop has an active internet connection (and Prey will actively search for open WiFi connections so no user interaction is needed), it’ll gather evidence which will be available to you, most importantly:

• The computers IP address, leading you to the ISP and possible internet cafe in question
• If your computer has a web-cam built in, you’ll be able to actually see the thief!

The prey control panel, where you can mark your equipment as missing

All of this info, and more, available to you from your control panel, or sent to you by email. Armed with the (approximate) location of your pc and hopefully a nice clear mugshot (picture) of the thief, off to the polici!

NOTE: Almost left out the other free, Open Source solution, doing roughly the same as Prey but just a tad less polished: Adeona…