Impact of Access Policy Changes for GeoIP databases

[adaminfinitum]

I'm working on customizing a Django application and am really interested in utilizing your app (I have a lot of experience with analytics and I hope the application will have international appeal), but I'm wondering how the changes to the access policies for those free databases is impacting users of your app?

I think I created an account with them to get access to the databases a few months ago (the policies went into effect at the end of 2019, I believe) but I can't imagine a command-line python command like python manage.py install_geoip_dataset would be compatible with that.

I appreciate your work and hope to be able to contribute to it but right now I have to prioritize my work tasks and don't want to try to integrate (another) app that seems simple but will end up being really complex and time consuming (at least at the moment).

Since you app depends on it, and I see you have pushed to the repo a couple months ago, can you tell me if it still works? Does it work but rely on a late 2019 GeoIP database?

Thanks.

[bryancwh]

I currently receive the error when running python manage.py install_geoip_dataset, even after specifying GEOIP_PATH in my settings:

<urlopen error [Errno 8] nodename nor servname provided, or not known>
CommandError: Unable to download MaxMind dataset.

anyone knows the solution to this?

[jose-lpa]

Thanks for your comments @adaminfinitum, and sorry for the (very) late reply.

As you sure can appreciate, I don't work with this app too much last times. I don't use it myself since a while, as it was some personal project I had back in the day and currently is decommissioned. Anyway, I read the requests from time to time and try to fix things for other users, but I already asked a couple of times to people to take ownership of the app (give them admin rights to repo to maintain and extend the app themselves) and nobody actually wanted to do that.

Now about your specific question: I was not aware about GeoIP datasets policy changes until I saw your comment and I checked their December 2019 notice. As other users say, apparently the automated download is broken, which makes sense. So that's the immediate effect of the new MaxMind policy of usage for the GeoIP2 datasets: now users will need to register with MM first in order to obtain the datasets, and of course automated download will not work any more (probably that can be solved by adding some user/password to the download code, though). As the GDPR and CCPA laws took effect with retroactivity, this is: also data existent before laws were enforced must comply with new regulations, there is no chance to rely in older 2019 GeoIP databases to make the automated download work.

For the rest, I guess everything should be the same: app will work as usual, but datasets have now to be manually downloaded.

I don't know if I will have time to solve that, but you are more than welcome to do so and, moreover, everyone is welcome to take ownership of this repo and keep it going as they need. I'll just hand over the admin permissions, if anyone volunteers.

Many thanks,
Jose