problem

Question

hiiiii all... i'm developing a web site...and my manager wanna prevent any user form certain country from accessing the (or loggon )site....example( anyone from Canada or Congo or any other country)...is there a web service or any other way to do this ??.... thx in advance........

spgilmore · Answer

If this is for legal purposes (such as you're providing encryption software which is illegal in the U.S. to export to foreign countries) this may be averted with a simple login or a web form that forces the user to certify that they are inside the U.S. Otherwise I would agree that you have to ban IP ranges which will probably never be 100% certain. Of course a Finnish user could theoretically dial up a PPP account with an ISP in the U.S. and get a U.S. IP address. Gating or telnetting through Unix shells can also bypass IP checks. This is pretty outlandish to consider but ... I guess the solution depends on *why* you want to do this.

sacresp · Answer

Weird demand :) I think the best you can do is check the clients IP address do a DNS lookup on it and parse the string (if it has been registered with a DNS). But it is possible you only have IP address. Then you'll have to log the IP addresses and check later manually using some ip lookup services in the net and deny some IP address ranges.