These tech posts on how I did something are mostly just a diary of my own server maintenance, so that in 11 months, when the website I googled is no longer found, I can remember what I did, why, where and how.
Familyvance.com was getting slammed by Russian bots with the former Soviets comprising more than 50% of all visits. Really, there’s no reason for anybody in Russia to visit familyvance.com, so I decided to just block the whole country. Sure, enterprising Slavs could use a VPN or Tor or whatever, but for the common use case, a country block should do.
So basically, I did this, also found here.
1. Make sure nginx has geoip module compiled in
nginx -V
2. Install GeoIP alternate package. This contrib package replaces the standard GeoIP database, and includes a cronjob to update the IP database files from maxmind automatically.
sudo apt-get install geoip-database-contrib
3. Update http block in nginx.conf. The first block is the pertinent bit, the second block ($exclusions), is in case you want to have exceptions within the country you blocked.
geoip_country /usr/share/GeoIP/GeoIP.dat;
map $geoip_country_code $allowed_country {
default yes;
RU no;
}
geo $exclusions {
default 0;
10.8.0.0/24 1;
}
4. Update server block in vhost familyvance.conf
if ($allowed_country = yes) {
set $exclusions 1;
}
if ($exclusions = "0") {
return 444;
}
5. Restart nginx
sudo service nginx restart
Sorry Boris.
