Fixing The Web

A site for both the WebMaster and the WebUser

Why Block Countries

Blocking out entire countries from our internet servers has become a necessary evil, at least for me it has. My primary web site and email server runs much more smoothly ever since I started blocking out certain countries. I sell software and hardware to Commodore 64/128 users all around the world, but I have never had a customer from China, Korea, or Indonesia, or many other countries too numerous to mention. The only encounters I've had with these countries is attempted hacking on my web server and spam attacks on my mail server. Fortunately, my system has been very secure and nothing bad has happened. Now, the problem might not be entirely with the actual people in these countries, as the people involved could very well be people from my own country here in the USA. They might be simply using ISP's from other countries to perform their attacks. The real problem is with the governments of these countries. They apparently don't care about all the trouble they are causing by allowing this stuff to happen.

So I say, enough is enough. If you don't need 'em, block 'em.

I got tired of all the nonsense coming in from hackers and spammers and started looking for ways to keep them out. I also did a lot of studying and checking to see where all this stupid activity was coming from. I couldn't find anything that really suited me, so as with many things I do, I created my own little project to keep these idiots out.

My first project was used for blocking on my firewall machine. This helps prevent access right there. Any country that is blocked at that point is also blocked from the internal network where the web servers and email servers reside. This blocking method uses the Linux kernel's iptables to do the work. That package is available for free downloading from this site.

I recently put up a remote site on a shared server and realized I couldn't use my existing blocking method because I didn't have access to the kernel's iptables functionality. So, off I went on another search and came up with nothing suitable. I needed something that could be used with the Apache web server to block all those bad countries. After much thought, I came up with a very good solution. That package is also available here for others who might have the same needs as I do.

If you are like me and want to keep these troublemakers away from your web sites, forums, blogs, chat rooms and anything else running on your site, feel free to download whichever one of the two packages that will work for you.

For more info, check out the following pages:

IPCountryBlock package for an entire dedicated server.
HTCountryBlock package for a web site running on a shared server.

Grab what you need and then begin your process of helping to police the internet. If you don't want someone messing with your stuff, keep the idiots out.