Support

I've enabled the GeoIP blocking feature, however the site is not blocked from foreign IP's. I want my site only visible to NA. I've tried with VPN's and the site is still visible. What can I do to fix this?

GeoIP blocking is not an exact science on the best of days. With all of the IP4 addresses being issued, blocks are bought, sold and traded between organizations frequently. It takes a while for the new addresses to catch up in the location database. The free version of the MaxMind database that we use is about 90% accurate.

That said, it sounds like you're experiencing more than a 10% failure rate. How did you set up the blocks, by country or by continent? Where are you seeing the access by blocked countries?

While GeoIP blocking will stop a bot, it is trivial for a human attacker to bypass it. They would simply log into an open proxy server in an allowed country and continue from there.

Right, I understand this isn't perfect, I'm trying to remove low hanging fruit so to speak. I've checked countries and continents. I VPN'd to a known (in my list) blocked country (Belgium) as I'm trying to block anywhere other than the US, and was still able to access the site. When I do an IP lookup it shows that my IP is from Belgium (not US).

Maybe it's something I'm missing.

It's not perfect but it's not supposed to be that easy either. Let's check some "Is it plugged in?" stuff:

1. In the Admin Tools control panel, you're not getting a message that Admin Tools is turned off? The Admin Tools plugin calls the GeoIP plugin so if it is off, nothing works.
2. The GeoIP plugin itself is turned on in your Plugins?
3. Reinstall the GeoIP plugin twice in a row, without doing anything in between. This trick usually works around a bug in the Joomla! installer where it forgets to copy some of the files during an upgrade or installation.

Hi Dale,

Thank you for your suggestion to check for "Is it plugged in?". The plugin was disabled. Enabled and viola! magically it works! Thanks for your help with this!