Trace a MAC address

[Leepy Lee]

Not sure if this is quite the right place to ask, but I'm sure someone can point me in the right direction if not.

At work, we have laptops that are loaned out to employees for short periods working at home etc. Over the years a few have gone missing.

I wondered if there was any way of tracing where they might be by searching for their MAC address on the Internet. Would it be possible to identify which netork/host a laptop was connected to?

Assuming this was feasible, would it be possible to send a pop up message saying "...bring the damn thing back...", or better still to disable it?

Cheers,

Lee

[jconstan]

Short answer is no. I believe MAC addresses are only available at the local network.

[cat5e]

Mac address does not reflect into the Internet.

And even if it is most computer are behind Routers and Firewall and you can not scan them.
And even if you could how can you scan for a MAC address of a computer that is at any given moment among hundred of Millions of computers that are on the Internet.

Most people do not realize that the term search the Internet is miss leading. None of us actually searches the Internet what we actually serrch is the data bases indexes of the Internet services like Live Search, Google, etc.

They are busy 24/7 scanning the major Internet servers, and create for us an index on their servers.

[Leepy Lee]

OK guys, thanks for the answers... :hammer

[KingSteve]

should have tracking software on those laptops.

http://www.lojackforlaptops.com/