NYCPHP Meetup

[Andrew Yochum]

John,

On Fri, Sep 23, 2005 at 02:11:00PM -0700, inforequest wrote:
> What open source options are there to do what GeoSelect does? (resolve 
> IP to City, State, Country, Lat, Long) server side in meory, with 
> caching, perhaps placing the values in server vars like GeoSelect does? 
> Maybe there is not yet a comprehensive (quality) IP to Geo database 
> being maintained open source?

There wasn't that I was aware of until poking around a bit tonight...

I've used the perl Geo::IPfree module in the past, but can't speak to
the data's thoroughness or quality.  I was interested in rough aggregate
quick and dirty stats at the time (a while back now), and I got this one
working very quickly.  It only does IP->Country stuff, so not really
what you want.
    http://search.cpan.org/~gmpassos/Geo-IPfree-0.2/lib/Geo/IPfree.pm

There are also seem various methods of accessing the freely available
MaxMind from within PHP now.
    http://www.maxmind.com/app/php
    http://www.maxmind.com/geoip/api/c.shtml
    http://www.maxmind.com/download/geoip/database/
Also, only IP->Country - at least, in open source, that is.  Including
their PEAR package for PHP 5 that seems to allow you to use their
commercial DB for more granular data:
    http://pear.php.net/pepr/pepr-proposal-show.php?id=91

And in looking at that stuff just now I noticed right next door to it in
PEAR is the Net_Geo PEAR package which seems to maybe do just what you
want using CAIDA database:
    http://pear.php.net/package/Net_Geo/
    http://www.caida.org/
I just played around with it a bit and found it very easy to use, and
reasonably accurate in locating a few IPs I threw at it.  It tells you
the granularity of the result, too.  It makes a remote HTTP request to a
CGI on the CAIDA site and caches the results.  Uncached queries
certainly lag a bit.  It could do the trick depending on your needs.

HTH,
Andrew
-- 
Andrew Yochum
Plexpod
andrew at plexpod.com
718-360-0879