Tadek’s Blog

I found out that MaxMInd provides a GeoLiteCity – a free(!) database for geolocating of IP addresses. You get to download a binary database (24MB) (monthly updated) and GPL libraries to perform lookups. They offer libraries for serveral languages including PHP, Perl, Python and Ruby.

I must say I am really impressed, a company offering such a database for free with really high quality tools (e.g., the bindings use auto{make|conf} tools and are really easy to install).

Where’s the catch? Well, they say that the database offers 60% accuracy – the commercial database ($370 plus $90 a month) offers 75% accuracy, plus more detailed info (ISP, postcode, area codes, etc). Anyways, it’s more than enough for my website statistics. Now displaying my visitors using GoogleMaps is a one evening work

Here’s a sample output of my DSL IP address and my server:

./geoiplookup 217.162.130.229
GeoIP Country Edition: CH, Switzerland
GeoIP City Edition, Rev 1: CH, 25, Langnau, (null), 47.283298, 8.533300, 0, 0
GeoIP City Edition, Rev 0: CH, 25, Langnau, (null), 47.283298, 8.533300

./geoiplookup tadek.pietraszek.org
GeoIP Country Edition: DE, Germany
GeoIP City Edition, Rev 1: DE, 02, Gunzenhausen, (null), 49.099998, 10.750000, 0, 0
GeoIP City Edition, Rev 0: DE, 02, Gunzenhausen, (null), 49.099998, 10.750000

Well done, guys and a really good marketing idea.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 26th, 2006 at 8:33 pm and is filed under Progs/Tools/Libs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.