Being constantly disappointed by the horrific cost of RTLS (think indoor GPS) combined with a recent edict to better track time and attendance in my department has led to this glorious albatross:
Now anyone can figure out what I'm (maybe) doing and (very generally) where I am while at the office! What's to keep me from tracking everyone doing everything, you ask?
Starting at the top we have:
FOUR separate scheduled tasks so that when my computer is locked (or idle for 5 minutes) my PC STATE can be reported as active or not. That involved way more jacking around than I'd imagined, but it could be the most accurate part of my little system.
EIGHT separate Outlook rules that run when I'm notified by our security system that I've swiped a reader to open a door (one for each door). The best their server can do is let me flag my card as "lost/trace" so it sends email every time I use it. Then Outlook updates a text file on the network.
ONE bad SNMP query. Ah, well. Turns out I didn't find the right OID for the hookstate of my phone and I don't really feel like digging it up (Cisco SPA112 if you've got the secret MIBs). I never use the thing anyway, since it's mostly there to be lovely. Query runs when the page loads.
And finally, a very rough cron job running on the machine that manages our WiFi. It posts/renames all of the http/inform connection files from the APs to the server, then PHP tries to find which one mentions the MAC address of my phone. Every single minute the thing runs. Oy.
That result also feeds a tag to load a little map with my current coverage area. One of FOURTEEN little maps.
Fun? Oh, yes! Not so practical, though. I only made it this far because I didn't have to worry about including any logic. I can't imagine trying to scale this to more than just me and my one device.
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