How we did it

How we tested Newbury Networks’ WiFi Watchdog.

We installed WiFi Watchdog in its minimum configuration (four LocalePoints) into two locations. The first location was a five-level office comprising 4,200 square feet and containing five access points. Two access points shared channels 6 and 11, and had nominal co-channel interference. The second installation location was a flat, 4,000 square-foot office in a business park containing six access points; this location had an adjacent business using one channel (1), while we used the other two U.S. non-interfering channels available (6 and 11). We used various access points from 3Com, DLink and Proxim and used four HP/Compaq notebooks with a variety of 802.11b and 802.11b/g cards; we also used two Apple Powerbook G4s using Apple internal ExtremeG cards.

We tested locale authentication and alarms using Windows XP and OS/X 10.2.3 clients (with the aforementioned notebooks) after ‘training’ Watchdog. Over a seven-day period, the MySQL database grew to only 35M bytes of data in size, and subsequently grew very slowly. The Watchdog application and MySQL database never took more than 20% CPU in the host machine (HP/Compaq ML330 Server with 1.3-GHz CPU and 1G-byte DRAM) and then for only very brief time periods. We found the reports and logs WiFi Watchdog generated to brief and terse, but useful.

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