Mystery Box

At work we have a mystery box that says it is a Sun Microsystems device. We can ping it, but not connect to it. We cannot find it yet. The tracerout doesn't make any sense. I cannot find much in our database as far as how to find the box goes. It is just sitting there, quietly absorbing electricity and bandwidth for no good reason.

It doesn't appear to be hindering us with the exception of hogging an IP address.

What is a sysadmin to do?

Losing a box amongst several labs is unforgivable, but believable. I've heard of a person who lost a box in an apartment. They could ping it, but not find it. They had to follow cables and tracked it down to a closet. What is to be done in the age of wireless? There could be imprecations beyond the confines of of the immediate area. this pings my imagination.

If someone left a wireless device on say a bus and set to find a connection, it could travel the country logging in when possible and handing over whatever information it could about it's location and what ever other sensors attached, cameras, microphones, temperature pressure anything else that comes to a devious mind.

If one designed a magnetic web cam that had a little wind mill, vibration generator, or solar panel attached to it for charging, you could snap this thing on the roof of a bus, boat or perhaps a plane with some planning and watch it go all over the place. You wold get plenty of loss, but you would have to design the devices with that in mind. These could be called mystery boxes because finding one would not necessarily tell you who had put it there. Put some legs on them or even wings and you have something that could be fun.

Homeland Security would go bat shit.