Locating laptops via Access Points?

[perseus19]

I'm working on a project to monitor devices (laptops) within a hospital, and we're looking for a way to record the last access point that a particular laptop was connected to. With that info, we can compare that to a map of AP locations and get a rough idea of the laptop location.

Now here's the tricky part - we'd like to do this without installing anything on the client. We have a list of all laptops on the network (Hostname/IP), and can ping them. Theoretically, shouldn't a traceroute or something similar show the IP address of the Access Point before it reaches the client?

The perfect scenario would be a process that regularly polls a list of hostnames and retrieves their current Access Point IP/MAC address. Any idea if this is possible?

[burble]

Now here's the tricky part - we'd like to do this without installing anything on the client. We have a list of all laptops on the network (Hostname/IP), and can ping them. Theoretically, shouldn't a traceroute or something similar show the IP address of the Access Point before it reaches the client?

The perfect scenario would be a process that regularly polls a list of hostnames and retrieves their current Access Point IP/MAC address. Any idea if this is possible?

A trace won't show the AP since the AP isn't doing any routing.

Depending on the AP you may be able to get a list of connected wireless clients (probably MAC address and IP address) using SNMP and then have an SNMP poll scheduled.