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.

