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To catch a thief

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by jamb

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I have a wireless school network. Am running W2K server and the clients are W98. Some of the lan cards have been stolen and I need to try to find or disable them.

1) Is there a way to trace the card back through the hub it is using?

2) Is there a way to set up an alert when the card signs on?

3) Is there a way to block the NIC address from accessing the network?

An help would be appreciated.

7 replies

by shmaltz

I believe that with SNMP you should be able to determine what port on the hub the NIC is using. Your hub has to support SNMP.

by zk

1. Sort of, if you have a list of all the MAC addresses of the cards before they were stolen.

2. Yes, by periodically checking all the MAC on the LAN. And writing a script to alert you if "stolen MAC" is found.

3. Well, if you use layer 2 switch, on some of them, you can configure all the ports on the switch with specific MAC addresses. Any time a NIC is stolen take its MAC address out of preconfigured list. Anything else out of the preconfigured list can be denied access to the network even if it is physically plugged in. But you said hub, so it might not be possible, I honestly don't know if such thing exists on hubs. May be not, as a hub doesn't have any intelligence.

All of these require quite some work. And is there a possibility of the thief using / bringing the card back in school, open the cover of a school computer to install a NIC then take it out after using it?

In your case, the easiest thing would be security camera. Simple, to the point, efficient.

This ismore of a physical security. So how about guards, video camera, other students noticing?

HTH & GL

by mjuhrig

from the server arp -p to view the arp cache
look for the MAC address of the stolen cards.
but why would someone steal the cards just to put them in another school machine? my guess is they are gone from the school and in someones house in that case your out of luck

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