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This guy's server: http://bash.org/?5273

<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.




Couldn't he configure it to do Bitcon Mining, then go look for it with thermal imaging?


Back then he could have configured it to search for Mersenne primes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Internet_Mersenne_Prime_...) or the like. There's always been capacious sinks for computer power ^_^.

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).


There are numerous way to heat a machine other then bitcoin mining( actually I doubt if bitcoins mining is the most efficient way)


fsvo efficient


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.


What to do in this cases? What are the options?


Disconnect cables from each switch and see when the ping replies stop :).


Unless it's on a WiFi connection, in which case things get substantially more complicated :)


Typically you can login to the router and see machines attached, and kick/ban MAC addresses.


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?)


And now you have really lost the machine.


You can turn off the electric breakers one by one


Clean your apartment.


If the server has a "PC speaker" like desktop computers then you could make them beep to help find them.


Send it an ASCII 7?




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