My night was going very well. I was very pleased with how practically flawless my afternoon progressed. At work I have two very small computers in a very public setting and they are performing as usual, wonderfully. Around 2am I woke up with a start because a nagging feeling that I was forgetting something hit me square between the eyes in that fuzzy zone between being awake and just falling to sleep. I had exposed two of my machines into the cold dangerous world without getting their MAC Addresses or Serial Numbers!

In many ways my work computers feel a lot like beloved pets. I care about them and look after them, and in this case worry about their safety. They were rather far away and in a particularly exposed condition where it’s terribly infeasible to go to them, flip them over, and get the information off their cases.

ARD to the rescue! Once again Apple Remote Desktop saves the day and quiets my worried mind. I opened my MacBook, connected to my workplace VPN, opened ARD, found my two little ones happily chugging along and remembered that ARD has some rather good reporting features baked-in to the software. I clicked on the first machine’s icon and went to Reports. I asked for Serial Number and the MAC Addresses for both the Airport wireless network adapter and the wired Ethernet adapter. I did this for both machines and printed the results as ‘PDF To Evernote’. Now I have all the information I forgot to get earlier stuffed into my Evernote archive.

Now, if, light-forbid my two exposed machines get stolen I won’t be sitting there facing the police with my pants around my professional I.T. ankles utterly unable to conjure on the spot Serial Numbers and MAC Addresses.

Now perhaps I can get some sleep!