Tag Archives: APT

Geolocation lookups in Linux (/Ubuntu)

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Have written a short post on this before, but it seems that I’ve only scratched the surface 🙂

For Ubuntu/Debian users, the APT package to install would be:

$ sudo apt-get install geoip-bin

In addition to its commercial offerings, MaxMind has free Country and City, and AS number lookup databases that can be queried using these command line tools in Linux. Installing the geoip-bin package installs the free version of the country database, but you don’t need to stop there!

By default, the free IP-Country database is situated at /usr/share/GeoIP/GeoIP.dat. Do note that the APT package for it is NOT updated automatically, so you will need to update it yourself.

Grabbing hold of the other two free databases (they’re updated monthly I think) and placing them the shared folder. IP-ASN is a nice way to quickly determine the ownership of an IP address, which you can follow up with actually looking through the WHOIS info should that be too generic. IP-City info comes with geolocation (lat-long coordinates!) info, which is very nice for plotting IP address lists on nice maps for analysis, or for the less technically inclined (or your bosses :P).

$ ls /usr/share/GeoIP/
GeoIPASNum.dat  GeoIP.dat  GeoLiteCity.dat

It appears that GeoIP and GeoIPASNum are queried automatically by default

$ geoiplookup 8.8.8.8
GeoIP Country Edition: US, United States
GeoIP ASNum Edition: AS15169 Google Inc.

Now let’s try querying for basic location information:

$ geoiplookup 8.8.8.8 -f /usr/share/GeoIP/GeoLiteCity.dat 
GeoIP City Edition, Rev 1: US, N/A, N/A, N/A, 38.000000, -97.000000, 0, 0

What are the MaxMind database versions currently “installed”?

$ geoiplookup 8.8.8.8 -v
GeoIP Country Edition: GEO-106FREE 20120403 Build 1 Copyright (c) 2012 MaxMind Inc All Rights Reserved
GeoIP ASNum Edition: GEO-117 20120402 Build 1 Copyright (c) 2012 MaxMind Inc All Rights Reserved

$ geoiplookup 8.8.8.8 -f /usr/share/GeoIP/GeoLiteCity.dat -v
GeoIP City Edition, Rev 1: GEO-533LITE 20120403 Build 1 Copyright (c) 2012 MaxMind Inc All Rights Reserved

If you want more verbose reporting (shows the IP address block that matched the query):

$ geoiplookup 8.8.8.8 -i
GeoIP Country Edition: US, United States
  ipaddr: 8.8.8.8
  range_by_ip:  8.7.211.0 - 8.14.223.255
  network:      8.8.0.0 - 8.11.255.255 ::14
  ipnum: 134744072
  range_by_num: 134730496 - 135192575
  network num:  134742016 - 135004159 ::14
GeoIP ASNum Edition: AS15169 Google Inc.
  ipaddr: 8.8.8.8
  range_by_ip:  8.8.8.0 - 8.8.8.255
  network:      8.8.8.0 - 8.8.8.255 ::24
  ipnum: 134744072
  range_by_num: 134744064 - 134744319
  network num:  134744064 - 134744319 ::24

$ geoiplookup 8.8.8.8 -f /usr/share/GeoIP/GeoLiteCity.dat -i
GeoIP City Edition, Rev 1: US, N/A, N/A, N/A, 38.000000, -97.000000, 0, 0
  ipaddr: 8.8.8.8
  range_by_ip:  8.7.228.0 - 8.8.37.255
  network:      8.8.0.0 - 8.8.31.255 ::19
  ipnum: 134744072
  range_by_num: 134734848 - 134751743
  network num:  134742016 - 134750207 ::19

Cooking all of this with a little CLI script-fu for mass lookups!

$ output=outputfile.csv; echo "ip,country" > $output; for  i in $( cat /path/to/list-of-ips.txt ); do echo "$i,\"$( geoiplookup -f /usr/share/GeoIP/GeoIP.dat $i | cut -d' ' -f4-99 )\"" >> $output; done

HTH, and have fun!

Doing geolocation lookups in command line

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Did you know that it’s possible to do your own geoip lookups from the linux command line?

You need to install the geoip-bin package in Ubuntu/Debian’s APT system:

sudo apt-get install geoip-bin

Then after which, lookups can be done as simply as:

$ geoiplookup 8.8.8.8
GeoIP Country Edition: US, United States

Note that the lookups are based on the GeoLite Country database.  For more detailed geoip lookups you will need to buy the better databases.

Converting IDNs in Ubuntu

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With the start of Internationalized domain names (IDNs) it sparked my interest since it requires conversion to punycode in order to continue working with existing DNS systems/applications, which work with ASCII.

Taking a search through Ubuntu’s APT system, to see whether any IDN related tools are available…

$ apt-cache search punycode

libidn11 - GNU Libidn library, implementation of IETF IDN specifications
libidn11-dev - Development files for GNU Libidn, an IDN library
idn - Command line and Emacs interface to GNU Libidn
libidn11-java - Java port of the GNU Libidn library, an IDN implementation
libidna-punycode-perl - encodes Unicode string in Punycode

There’s the idn package!  Which allows encoding of IDNs in punycode in the command line…

Doing an install…

$ sudo apt-get install idn -y

And trying it out!

$ idn правительство.рф

libidn 1.15
Copyright 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 Simon Josefsson.
GNU Libidn comes with NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.
You may redistribute copies of GNU Libidn under the terms of
the GNU Lesser General Public License.  For more information
about these matters, see the file named COPYING.LIB.
xn--80aealotwbjpid2k.xn--p1ai

And resolving the domain…

$ nslookup xn--80aealotwbjpid2k.xn--p1ai

Non-authoritative answer:
Name:	xn--80aealotwbjpid2k.xn--p1ai
Address: 95.173.135.62

Note that resolving the domain directly results in rubbish!

$ nslookup правительство.рф

Non-authoritative answer:
Name:	208191209128208176208178208184209130208181208187209140209129209130208178208190.209128209132
Address: 67.215.65.132

So, basically from this we understand that applications will need to use the punycode encoded version of the IDN, NOT the original IDN, when resolving.  And there’re tools out there already can do that for us.

Since Ubuntu has these packages, Debian would also have the corresponding packages available too.