Forum Discussion
Matt_59095
Nimbostratus
NimbostratusIP to DNS reverse lookup + Geo location? Delimitted format?
LTM 1500 9.4.8
Hi - we'd like to see where our website traffic is coming from, and by which companies. I'd prefer to log that into a format that i can read into a database table, so that i ...
hooleylist
Cirrostratus
CirrostratusHi Matt,
I think it would be more efficient (and cheaper) to do this on an application server.
In v10.1, LTM adds an inbuilt Quova GeoIP database. See the whereis wiki page for details (http://devcentral.f5.com/wiki/iRules.whereis.ashx). But with the default license you get with LTM, you can only use the database to make load balancing decisions. You can't pass the GeoIP data onto any other non-LTM host. You could try getting a custom license for more than this from Quova, but I don't think it's cheap. Even if you could use the default Quova license for this, I don't think it makes sense to try to log every HTTP request or TCP connection via LTM and do IP lookups just for reporting. That would eat into the resources LTM should be using for app delivery.
On the other hand, you could pull your www server logs and perform GeoIP and reverse DNS lookups on them for reporting. MaxMind offers a free GeoIP database with a lot of options for querying.
Aaron