IPCOP’s had a few too many donuts
I finally have an IT project at Church! Unfortunately, I screwed it up. 
We are implementing an open wireless network to provide internet access to ‘Common Grounds’, our new in-house coffee shop/bookstore. This is a huge step for us. I was trying to find the best way to protect our local network from whatever may come in off the street. I’m sure you’ve all been there.
The cheapest and best solution I found was to go with a Linux firewall/router solution–IPCOP. Now, conceptually, this is a great idea. IPCOP has up to 4 interfaces you can set up: RED-External, GREEN-Internal, ORANGE-DMZ, and BLUE-Wireless. The Blue and Green networks are completely independent by default. This sounded like the perfect solution for us.
But, I have a glitch.
I installed the IPCOP Monday, and was very happy with how things were going. Unfortunately, I didn’t do enough testing. The staff was complaining all week about the internet being very slow. Now our internet isn’t very fast anyway. We are only getting about 800Kbs down and 200Kbs up. Nonetheless, after doing a speed test on the line with the IPCOP in place, we were only getting 156Kbs down! The upload speed was actually consistent with what I would expect to get (200Kbs). I was about to call the ISP when just for the sake of experimentation, I put the old router back in place. Our down speed went back up to 800Kbs.
I have no idea what is going on. I want to believe the hardware IPCOP is running on is ok, but seriously, how could a default install of IPCOP create that much of a bottleneck? I’ll let you know when I figure out what I’m doing wrong.
Here we used a ZoneCD iso and used spare parts. Nothing fancy but works great. They have a pay service if you need to track users. If you don’t care then the totally free version works fine. You can tighten down the bandwidth for the hotspot users. It also filters out bad sites. Since I had the old PC, 2 network cards, and wireless router it was not only free but I had it working in one afternoon.