Should we bundle the MaxMind GeoIP db?

G.W. Haywood bind at jubileegroup.co.uk
Thu May 31 07:20:07 UTC 2018


Hi Victoria,

On Wed, 30 May 2018, Victoria Risk wrote:

> ... would it be useful if we included the GeoLite2 database with the
> BIND distribution? Since we update at least twice a year, we could
> keep it fairly well up to date, and it would save users having to go
> get and update the db themselves. It would add about 1.5MB to the
> BIND distribution (depending on whether we use the country or city
> level).
> 
> Votes, comments welcome.

The increase in sizes of the distributions would be of no concern to me.

I would hope to see both IPv4 and IPv6 data as well as the ASN data,
without which it would be of no use to me.

At present I use the Debian package, which updates much more often than
twice yearly.  I keep no data on the volumes of changes, but the file
timestamps today tell me that the changes are infrequent so I guess I'd
be relaxed about that:

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  4638365 Mar 24 10:10 GeoIPASNum.dat
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 20539238 Mar 27 13:05 GeoLiteCity.dat
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  1242574 Mar 27 13:17 GeoIP.dat
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 21662641 May  1 21:14 GeoLiteCityv6.dat
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  2297267 May  1 21:23 GeoIPv6.dat
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  5564550 May  5 11:10 GeoIPASNumv6.dat

I use the database to screen incoming mail connections to limit abuse.
Connections are blocked or permitted by a pure Perl homebrew Sendmail
milter based on the Country and/or ASN as identified by a GeoIP lookup
on the connecting IP.

Lookup failures in the ASNUM edition are much more common than in the
country and the city 'rev. 1' editions, and it seems much more common
since March this year.  I do keep stats on those, although they're not
very illuminating.  If they'd be of any interest you'd be very welcome
to have them.

HTH

-- 

73,
Ged.


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