Tracking Missing Macbooks

[Morningside]

My school has about 40 Macbook Airs for students to use. From time to time they go missing, but usually turn up in a classroom somewhere.  I tried to turn on Find My Mac using managed appleids but none of them worked. When I called Apple they told me that managed appleid's do not have this feature and that I should consider tracking devices with an MDM "like Jamf".

I was surprised to say the least.  Can anyone point me to a doc detailing how to accomplish this with Jamf?

[AJPinto]

Anything live would require the Mac to be online and talking to JAMF. Anything static is only as good as the last device checkin, if a device has moved since it checked in last you wont have anything usable. 

The most reliable way I can think of to find the location of a Mac is with its IP address. Depending on how many subnets you guys have, what subnet the Mac is on can narrow down where it is by a good margin. Beyond reading something like network location. Everything else like geolocation is something apple has actively blocked in recent years. Beyond JAMF having something hackey they can tell you, this really does seem like an Apple question.

[Morningside]

I have asked around in various subreddits and many replies indicated that they leverage their MDM for this, but it is unclear to me if Jamf is one of the MDM's that has a solution for this.  As far as I can tell, since managed appleIDs cannot use Find My Mac, the best solution is to slog through making 40 consumer appleIDs. 

If it were not for the political inertia in my school I'd have replace all these macbooks with chromebooks 2 years ago.

[daniel_ross]

You probably want a tool like Prey https://preyproject.com

Here is a great JNUC video about it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrIrCK6VD44