IPFire Location is a geo location database which will tell you in which country a host on the Internet is located. It will also tell you in which Autonomous System (AS) this host is. In IPFire we use this information to make better decisions about which connections to block and we use it to collect metrics, etc.
But it is not only IPFire which benefits from this data. This is something we designed into the project from the very beginning when we launched it as a very lightweight library that is also very portable. So far, one of the many other users of our location database is the Tor project, but the list is getting longer and longer.
Because of the very straight-forward and simple interface, it is easy to integrate libloc - the backbone of the database - into other applications. The only downside is of course, that the library needs to be available. And now this is getting even easier.
Thanks to Jochen & Petr
Thanks to Jochen Sprickerhof who is part of Debian, and Petr PÃsaÅ™ who works for RedHat, libloc is now packaged for Debian 12 and Fedora 38. And it can be installed with only one simple command:
# For Debian
$ apt-get install libloc1
# For Fedora
$ dnf install libloc
Help Us Spreading The Word
If you are part of any other distribution, we would encourage you to package libloc, too, so that as many people as possible can enjoy the work that we are doing and enrich their applications with our location data. Get in touch on our mailing list.
If you want to use the IPFire Location database, learn how on our How To Use page.