Comments on: Phone Home Script to Protect Your Laptop

By: JohnQ

JohnQ — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 23:21:18 +0000

On small modification … I was using wget and after the initial file was downloaded any newly downloaded files from the server were being placed in new files like this: /tmp/phonehome.1 /tmp/phonehome.2 etc.

Obviously, the script on the Mac that you’re hoping would execute the new commands doesn’t know about the new file names, so I add this to the top of the script:

if [ -s /tmp/phonehome ]
then
mv /tmp/phonehome /tmp/phonehome_$RANDOM
fi

…. then the rest of the script like it is above……..

Also, make sure cron can see any commands you want executed in /tmp/phone.bash … to be safe put full pathnames to anything you want run.

By: Artem Russakovskii

Artem Russakovskii — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 07:10:42 +0000

Of course, if the thief didn’t reinstall the OS immediately, he deserves to be caught, otherwise lojack will probably do a better job/

At the end of the day however, the data on the laptop is more important, which is why I would use a full volume encryption method, like BCVE, or whatever the Mac users fancy.

By: Dave Gullo

Dave Gullo — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 15:03:57 +0000

Yeah, Leo Laporte was talking about that on the radio this morning. A person got their camera gear stolen, and the camera had some type of auto-upload functionality to her Fickr or Picassa over wifi. The thieves were caught because of hundreds of pictures they took of themselves. While LoJack for laptops is nothing new, you take it to a whole new "roll-your-own" level.

… regarding software: when people say why don’t you just use "X", I say, because I wrote "Y"…

By: mike

mike — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 04:45:40 +0000

It sounds pretty cool, but the idea of blindly executing the contents of a script, even on a server you control, kinda scares the crap out of me. Maybe put in some shared key signing or something? I don’t know, it just seems like a potentially big hole.