Productivity Sauce

To recover a lost or stolen notebook, you need all the help you can get -- and this is where Pombo can come in rather handy. The key component of the Pombo solution is a tiny Python script that runs on your notebook. The script runs quietly in the background and collects tracking information such as the IP address and information about all network interfaces as well as information about nearby wireless access points. In addition to that, the script can take a screenshot using the scrot tool and capture a snapshot with the notebook's webcam using the streamer utility. The script then packs, encrypts, and uploads the tracking information to a destination server.

To get Pombo running on your notebook, you have to install the required packages. On Ubuntu and its derivatives, this can be done using the sudo apt-get install traceroute scrot pngnq streamer command. Next step is to generate a public key. To do this, run the gpg --gen-key command and follow the directions. Once the system has generated the key, note the key ID which consists of 8 hex digits identifying the public key. In the example below, the GPG key ID is 1B2AFA1C.

pub 1024D/1B2AFA1C 2005-03-31 Dmitri Popov <dmpop@openoffice.org> Key fingerprint = 117C FE83 22EA B843 3E86 6486 4320 545E 1B2A FA1C sub 1024g/CEA4B22E 2005-03-31 [expires: 2010-12-31]

Export the created key and add it to the root keyring using the following commands:

gpg --export -a "Your Name" > publickey.key
sudo -H gpg --import publickey.key

Grab the latest version of Pombo, unpack the downloaded archive and move the pombo.py file to the /usr/local/bin directory. Open the pombo.conf file in a text editor and modify the default settings as shown in the example below.

# Pombo configuration file
[DEFAULT]
gpgkeyid=1B2AFA1C
password=secret
serverurl=http://127.0.0.1/pombo.php

Move then the pombo.conf file to the /etc directory. Rename pombo.php4 or pombo.php5 (depending on which version of PHP is installed on your server) to pombo.php. Open the file, locate the $PASSWORD='mysecret' line, and replace the default password with the one you specified in the pombo.conf file. Upload then the file to your server.

On your notebook, you also have to create a cron job which will run the pombo.py script at predefined time intervals. To do this, run the sudo crontab -e command and add the desired schedule, for example:

@daily /usr/local/bin/pombo.py 2>/dev/null

The job above will run the script every day, discarding all error messages. To see whether everything works properly, run the sudo -H /usr/local/bin/pombo.py command. The script should display the Server responded: File stored message and upload an encrypted file on the server. To decrypt the file, use the following command:

gpg -d -o archive.zip archive.zip.gpg

Obviously, Pombo can be useful only if the person who has your notebook actually turns it on, logs into the system, and establishes an Internet connection. Considering that your notebook runs Linux, this is not very likely, but installing Pombo definitely won't hurt.

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