ERROR 403: Permission Denied :-( [FIXED]

[catellie]

OK, looks like I have overused this excellent service as whenever I try to access it from my home IP I get the error message in the subject. Does this mean I'm blocked forever or is this blocked removed after a while? (Yes, I had an automated script that transformed IP-addresses in my access log into rough lat/long position, but it has been disable for a while now. Sorry!)

[rleeden]

Wow - 4 posts and a PM. You're obviously keen to get my attention....or are you trying to overuse this forum too

I have unblocked your IP so you should be able to use Geotool again. And yes you had been blocked because of your automated script. If you are capable of writing a script to do this kind of thing, you really should look at doing it locally. Have a look at the Maxmind APIs for some pointers.

[catellie]

Wow - 4 posts and a PM. You're obviously keen to get my attention....or are you trying to overuse this forum too

Ah, the posts goot through after all? I kept getting "bad encoding" instead of a confirmation when I pressed submit (using standard Firefox in Ubuntu which I would assume is what you use yourselves?) That's why I send the PM in the end.

Please feel free to remove any dups (or even all of it.)

I have unblocked your IP so you should be able to use Geotool again.

Excellent!

And yes you had been blocked because of your automated script. If you are capable of writing a script to do this kind of thing, you really should look at doing it locally. Have a look at the Maxmind APIs for some pointers.

Thanks, will do. My script was pretty trivial really, curl with a few options piped to a well aimed grep and then a cut. A 2 min hack or so. I guess you might not even have noticed if I had cached my lookups (simple file grep) and added a random delay... I just assumed your excellent service gets so many lookups it wouldn't be noticed. I was seriously wrong.

Again, thanks and my humble apologies

[catellie]

In case anyone else reads this with a similar idea: Using the GeoLiteCity database required roughly as much scripting as my just mentioned hack.
Big wins: significantly quicker, doesn't tax the flagfox servers.
Slight drawback: needs to be updated once a month (simple crontab hack though), trivial installation.

Thanks for the pointer, Richard.