NAME

       Geo::IPfree - Look up the country of an IPv4 address

SYNOPSIS

           use Geo::IPfree;

           my $geo = Geo::IPfree->new;
           my( $code1, $name1 ) = $geo->LookUp( '200.176.3.142' );

           # use memory to speed things up
           $geo->Faster;

           # lookup by hostname
           my( $code2, $name2, $ip2 ) = $geo->LookUp( 'www.cnn.com' );

DESCRIPTION

       Geo::IPfree is a Perl module that determines the originating country of an arbitrary IPv4
       address. It uses a local file-based database to provide basic geolocation services.

       An updated version of the database can be obtained by visiting the Webnet77 website:
       <http://software77.net/geo-ip/>.

METHODS

   new( [$db] )
       Creates a new Geo::IPfree instance. Optionally, a database filename may be passed in to
       load a custom data set rather than the version shipped with the module.

   LoadDB( $filename )
       Load a specific database to use to look up the IP addresses.

   LookUp( $ip | $hostname )
       Given an IP address or a hostname, this function returns three things:

       •   The ISO 3166 country code (2 chars)

       •   The country name

       •   The IP address resolved

       NB: In order to use the location services on a hostname, you will need to have an internet
       connection to resolve a host to an IP address.

       If you pass a private IP address (for example 192.168.0.1), you'll get back a country code
       of ZZ, and country name of "Reserved for private IP addresses".

   Clean_Cache( )
       Clears any cached lookup data.

   Faster( )
       Make the LookUp() faster, which is good if you're going to be calling Lookup() many times.
       This will load the entire DB into memory and read from there, not from disk (good way for
       slow disk or network disks), but use more memory. The module "Memoize" will be enabled for
       some internal functions too.

       Note that if you call Lookup() many times, you'll end up using a lot of memory anyway, so
       you'll be better off using a lot of memory from the start by calling Faster(), and getting
       an improvement for all calls.

   nslookup( $host, [$last_lookup] )
       Attempts to resolve a hostname to an IP address. If it fails on the first pass it will
       attempt to resolve the same hostname with 'www.' prepended. $last_lookup is used to
       supress this behavior.

   ip2nb( $ip )
       Encodes $ip into a numerical representation.

   nb2ip( $number )
       Decodes $number back to an IP address.

   dec2baseX( $number )
       Converts a base 10 (decimal) number to base 86.

   baseX2dec( $number )
       Converts a base 86 number to base 10 (decimal).

VARS

       $GeoIP->{db}
           The database file in use.

       $GeoIP->{handler}
           The database file handler.

       $GeoIP->{dbfile}
           The database file path.

       $GeoIP->{cache} BOOLEAN
           Set/tell if the cache of LookUp() is on. If it's on it will cache the last 1000
           queries. Default: 1

           The cache is good when you are parsing a list of IPs, generally a web log.  If in the
           log you have many lines with the same IP, GEO::IPfree won't have to make a full search
           for each query, it will cache the last 1000 different IPs. After each 1000 IPs the
           cache is cleaned to restart it.

           Note that the Lookup make the query without the last IP number (xxx.xxx.xxx.0), then
           the cache for the IP 192.168.0.1 will be the same for 192.168.0.2 (they are the same
           query, 192.168.0.0).

DB FORMAT

       The data file has a list of IP ranges & countries, for example, from 200.128.0.0 to
       200.103.255.255 the IPs are from BR. To make a fast access to the DB the format tries to
       use less bytes per input (block). The file was in ASCII and in blocks of 7 bytes: XXnnnnn

         XX    -> the country code (BR,US...)
         nnnnn -> the IP range using a base of 85 digits
                  (not in dec or hex to get space).

       See CPAN for updates of the DB...

NOTES

       The file ipscountry.dat is a dedicated format for Geo::IPfree.  To convert it see the tool
       "ipct2txt.pl" in the "misc" directoy.

       The module looks for "ipscountry.dat" in the following locations:

       •   /usr/local/share

       •   /usr/local/share/GeoIPfree

       •   through @INC (as well as all @INC directories plus "/Geo")

       •   from the same location that IPfree.pm was loaded

SEE ALSO

       •   http://software77.net/geo-ip/

AUTHOR

       Graciliano M. P. <gm@virtuasites.com.br>

MAINTAINER

       Brian Cassidy <bricas@cpan.org>

THANK YOU

       Thanks to Laurent Destailleur (author of AWStats) that tested it on many OS and fixed bugs
       for them, like the not portable sysread, and asked for some speed improvement.

COPYRIGHT & LICENSE

       This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same
       terms as Perl itself.