This is an update I have personally been waiting for a long time: We finally roll out replacing Maxmind's GeoIP database by our own improved implementation.

IPFire Location

As we have already pre-announced some time ago this side-project inside the IPFire Project is finally ready for prime time.

It comes with a new implementation to build, organise and access a highly optimised database packages with loads of helpful data for our firewall engines, as well as our analytics to analyse where attacks against the firewall are originating from.

With it, IPFire can block attackers from certain countries, or do the opposite - only permit access to certain servers from certain places. Combining rules with the rate-limiting feature allows to limit connections from certain locations which is very helpful for DoS attacks.

No new features have been added, but those that we had have been massively improved. The database is now being updated once a week which makes it more accurate and we no longer require complicated scripts to convert it into different formats to be used in different parts of the operating system.

Instead the database can be opened and ready extremely quickly which allows access in realtime making pages on the web user interface load significantly faster.

We hope that many other projects choose to use our implementation as well, since we have chosen a truly open license for the data as well as the library that works behind it.

I will talk more about this in a later blog post and explain to you the advantages of libloc.

Please help us testing!

In the meantime, please help us testing this important release and report any issues that you find to the development team to make it the best release of IPFire that we have ever had.

You can also support our work with your donation!