We do more or less the same thing. Since you have to either register your laptop and the registration logs the MAC, or you're using WPA and the MAC gets logged via radius, finding this information tends to be fairly easy even if the user doesn't remember it themselves. We do have a script which, I believe (someone else wrote it), searches the ARP caches every so many minutes and tries to automatically walk our equipment path to a leaf port when it finds a MAC in the watch list. That way we get paged with both an alert that the MAC is online, and where it is. The same system works for both wired and wireless.
We've actually had a reasonable rate of success, with a number of recovered laptops. That being said, the current university purchasing guidelines mandate a BIOS based tracking system on all new laptops (but that won't affect students, which the majority of our cases is.) It helps to have a good working relationship with the university police, where the detectives know who in the IT department can help them, what they can do, and the IT people can call the detectives directly to let them know when the pages come in, and both sides have either a formal or informal procedure. -- Toivo Voll Network Administrator Information Technology Communications University of South Florida (Not speaking for the university) ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
