Geo Location on IP Address

mark00707

Hi all

Anyone know about a script/product that can determine "rough" geo location for a user (as rough as "The Americas", "UK", "Europe" etc).

I'm wanting to show prices in Sterling/Euro/Dollar, and would like to serve up the ideal one to the site visitor.

Thanks!

Mark

justsomeone

a good whois server should be able to provide this information - see smaple output at http://www.dnsstuff.com/tools/whois.ch?ip=17.123.12.12

You could just send a request to a friendly whois server and parse the info you want from the result.

mark00707

Ta for that - although I'd want not to be reliant on another server/service. Is there some kind of open source db available anywhere?

justsomeone

Whois is a core internet service, a bit like DNS. Effectively it is an open database. You should be able to spread the risk by having a pool of dns servers to query. You could also cache the results etc to reduce network load.

The website I linked to is just a convenient way of showing the results of a whois query. You don't need to use that website at all.

mark00707

Hmm. I'd be a bit worried about any possible lag in querying another server, even a pool - I'm guessing that this could add (possibly) upwards of a second to (my) page parsing?

Is it possible to obtain their database in any format?

justsomeone

Not that I know of. I don't think it's held centrally anywhere, it's a loose network of smaller databases, all constantly being updated.

But I could be wrong.

Caching the result would mean that the delay only happens once per session.