I use to have a laptop, back in the day, that subsequently got stolen. However, since I planned for it to get stolen I had setup a keylogger on it. It logged all my stuff and sent it to a email account at gmail. When that computer was stolen i was able to access my logs and find out where it was. Unfortunately for me it turned out to be someone i knew.

that sucked

anyways i want to do that with my new laptop running ubuntu. I have done some research and found lkl and maybe a few others. how do i get the logs automatically scheduled to upload and then deleted from a directory?

how would some of you peeps setup something up like this? Remember this is for purposes of security and it has paid off so incredibly before.

Honestly, I wouldn't, for what you're describing. Granted, it worked once before...but I think it was luck.

Most thieves are going to wipe the drive and sell it, as is. Keylogger is gone. Even if they don't, and ship it somewhere...what will it do then? If it winds up 1000 miles away, how are you going to know who has it, and how are you going to get it back? By the time the ISP's, police, etc., track down which account it's registered to, get someone in a car with a warrant, etc., the laptop will probably be obsolete. Better to have it insured, and buy a new one. There are a few things found through Google:

Looks promising, but currently unusable.
http://adeona.cs.washington.edu/downloads.html

Tutorial using Dyndns..
http://www.arsgeek.com/2007/05/04/ho...t-gets-stolen/


To keep your data safe, though, I'd encrypt the drive, put BIOS boot passwords on it, and generally make it hard for anyone who didn't know the password(s) to use it. There are ways around it, of course, but you're looking to keep the data safe.

Nobody can reply with a hypothetical brainstorm ??? toss me some ideas??

You can't read the reply I posted, with two ideas, or even acknowledge it??

You might want to look into:
http://preyproject.com/

and:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/51329/

Also look at your bios, mine has an option built right into the bios that can track it if it's stolen, I don't have it activated because it looked like it wouldn't do anything unless you paid and subscribed to a special service, but there could be other options.

Yeah, that's the LoJack for Laptops thing. Not only do you have to pay for it, but it's got to be Windows or Mac...and still needs a software agent on the hard drive in order to function. So, a drive reformat renders it useless, as would just going in to the BIOS and disabling it.