Support

Hi Dan,

1. You can always back up and restore the jos_admintools_* tables. Transferring them between two sites is what is required to transfer all settings.

2. This is stupid idea on its own right. GeoBlocking is the silliest and most inefficient security method. If you're trying to keep the content from being accessed in his country, there's something called Google and Bing which offer cached pages. From a security perspective, if I were a hacker in his country I'd just simply use a proxy server in another country and use it to attack his site. Nowadays you can even rent SSH tunnels for less than 20$/month. Therefore, GeoBlocking is a stupid idea, but I digress.

In order for Joomla! to know WHO he is so as not to block him, he has to log in. In order to log in, he had to access the site's back-end as a guest user. But as a guest user he's going to be blocked by WAF, because we don't know who he is yet. The only workaround is for him to have a static IP and add that to the Administrator IP Whitelist. This way, Admin Tools will know who he is based on his IP, not blocking him.

He should also note that he's putting pitfalls to himself. IF he's on vacation and on a mobile connection or in an Internet cafe, he won't be able to access his site. Chances are he won't have FTP access either, so he'll effectively be cut off from his own site. I don't think it's something he wants :)

Oh, yeah, it will be! :D The most effective way to convince a client that what they ask for is not what they really need is to implement it and let them beg to roll back this feature. It's exactly the reason why GeoBlock has not been removed from Admin Tools. Too many people were asking for this feature, despite me telling them that it's a Very Bad Idea(tm) :)

Let's say I want to visit your site and rip off your designs. Even if you have GeoBlocking turned on I can:
- Use Google and Bing's cached copied of your site's pages
- Use a free anonymising proxy, usually operating from the US or EU
- Use a service like Secure Tunnel which allows me to "tunnel" my trafic through their servers, effectively making your server believe that I come from the US
- Simply have one of my contacts in the US access your site, download all the information I need and send them back to me by email, file upload, ship it on a USB stick,...

Ergo, GeoBlocking is a sham. It only blocks the biggest idiots, but not anyone who knows what he's doing.

PS: I have personally tried the first three workarounds when my (static) IP got accidentally blocked by the firewall of a server I was working on and I wanted to fetch some information and then fix the IP blocking problem.