And I think the downvotes are uncalled for, the general idea is excellent, even if Bitcoin mining is iffy in a corporate setting (very bad if you keep them, and the finance people won't know what to do with them, plus their tax treatment is not trivial).
He could, except this quote predates Bitcoin by at least five years. Oldest reference for this page in the wayback machine is in 2003. The quote may be even older than that.
Been there. Except in my case it was two 8 story office buildings.
Stuff was moved in hastily from an acquired company when there was no room in the server room, hooked up because important (mail server), and subsequently forgotten while departments where shuffled around the building and employees left over a period of many months.
A week after I started the server started having issues. And nobody knew where it was... Finally found it in some storage room.
That still won't help you find where the machine is located though. With cables you can presumably just follow the cable when you realize disconnecting one stops the pings
Wardriving software like kismet will show your the RSSI of the AP. Is it possible with stock hardware to determine the RSSI of connected devices? Then it is just the hot/cold game. I'm sure actual radio triangulation/direction finding would be possible as well but I'm not sure how difficult that would be.
You could have an electrician identify circuits and start throwing circuit breaker switches to achieve the same result? (obviously might be a bit chaotic, but it'd be a good time to test your UPS infrastructure at the same time, right?)
<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.