Peter's Blog

I was studying the statcounter logs for this site and lamenting how the country info only lists the last 100 page views. Because one visitor can look at 50 pages, their country will appear to take 50% of traffic, giving a distorted view of proceedings.

So I decided to update my awstats config with GeoIP to give long term country information. GeoIP is a library from MaxMind that converts IP addresses to countries. Country lookup is free, you can pay for higher resolution lookup (city etc) if you have the $$$.

I installed it as follows:

• Installed the MaxMind GeoIP C Library and perl library from here
• I downloaded and installed the country database.
• I let these configure and install themselves. This may lead to an unholy mix with my debian apt setup but it is more likely to work than if I start messing with it.
• I went into webmin and enabled the GeoIP plugin. A word of recommendation here, webmin does a great job of managing multiple sites with awstats. In fact webmin does a great job of most things.

There is an old version of GeoIP that comes as a debian package but it installs in a debian way and was not picked up by the MaxMind Perl module so I installed the MaxMind stuff by the book.

It seems to be running, it is showing visitors from germany and stuff but I need to let it run for longer and see if the number of visitors from unknown countries goes down (it probably doesn't add country info to old records only new ones).

This may end up simply telling me where the bots that make up a large number of my visitors come from: so far this month this site has used 1.15G of bandwidth. Accursed Inktomi Slurp (which I think is yahoo) has taken 177Mb of this. Googlebot has taken 77M but given me 7073 visitors against 182. Slurp is a good name. It has probably uploaded all the text on the site 100 times. I don't change it that much.