
Levy: Gone, Without a Trace  - nickb
http://www.newsweek.com/id/120052
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phaedrus
This article was rather pointless...

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TheTarquin
Reminds me of one of my favorite bash.org quotes:

"<erno> hm. I've lost a machine.. literally _lost_. it responds to ping, it
works completely, I just can't figure out where in my apartment it is."

I'm sure as machines become smaller, such events will become more frequent. .
. . That is, of course, right up until we start implanting our machines
directly in our brains.

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SwellJoe
I've had that happen dozens of times in my years as a sysadmin. Servers in
development shops, in particular, have a habit of hiding in strange places. I
once found that a regular office that hadn't been in use for about a year, and
the whole team that had worked in it had long since left the company, housed a
server (really just a desktop that was used as a dev server, and then became
the production server when they finished developing the application) that was
running one of the companies customers website and database. No one knew where
it was, but it was still working so nobody had gone looking for it. It only
found its way into the server room when the whole company move to another
location.

It's worse when it comes to figuring out which Windows workstation is infected
with a virus (they're easy to see at the gateway box, if it's a machine that
can run ethereal or tcpdump). I would just unplug the fastest flashing port on
the network switch and yell out, "Alright, who can't connect to the Internet?"
Whoever spoke up was sitting in front of the infected host.

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TheTarquin
We had a (passingly) similar situation at my office recently: a line of boxes
that had been humming along happily for as long as I've been at the company.
Someone (certainly not _me_ , oh heavens no) needed a network connection and
asked around "is this box hosting anyone's project"? Getting nos all around, I
(er, I mean, someone) snagged that box's cable.

Turns out it wasn't hosting anyone's project, but it WAS acting as the gateway
into our network that my boss used on a daily basis.

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derefr
> Unlike the often-misplaced cell phone, it can't be called so you can locate
> it by ring

Am I the only one here who would just SSH into their computer and play a sound
file? It _does_ have wireless... although it might be asleep.

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SwellJoe
It's a bitch to enable SSH connections on the Mac. At least, I found it so on
my girlfriend's Macbook.

And, of course, if the machine is off, as a laptop that is lost is very likely
to be, ssh won't answer even if you do have it enabled and accepting
connections.

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mascarenhas
Apple fanboy embarasses himself. Film at 11.

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softbuilder
I couldn't get read past the author's picture. Impossible to take him
seriously. He's like a self caricature.

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pg
Actually he's the most hacker-like journalist I've met. So it's just as well
you can't see the people on this site, or you'd have the same problem with
most of them.

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softbuilder
I don't mind what he looks like in real life. But it's just silly to _actively
try_ to look like a stereotype in a professional photo. As a counter-example,
look at his website. He looks nerdy but in a totally normal way. He'd be
better off with the photo from his webpage on the article because the context
sets off the oddness. My 2 cents.

