IPCountryBlock Package
by Maurice Randall and FixingTheWeb.com
Version 1.6beta
July 18, 2011

If you are updating from a previous release:

Updating from previous releases of this IPCountryBlock package is fairly
simple. There are some extra files included that were not in previous
releases. This README file is one of them along with new HTML documentation
files. There is a helper file called displayresults.php that you do not
load directly. It is called by another one of the files. There is also a
new menu program called menu.php. This will certainly help you to remember
which file to load for the task at hand. Just click a button.

Otherwise, delete the following files from your current installation:

countryblock.txt
countryiptables.php
countryiptsetup.php

No other files need to be deleted. Keep your existing countries.php file and
all the countries you are currently blocking will still be checked when you
run countryiptables.php. It would be a good idea to rerun the new
countryiptsetup.php program to rebuild your database files. This new release
builds them in a slightly cleaner way. But the old ones will still work until
you rebuild them.

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For new users, read these quick installation instructions to get up and
running:

Create a new directory on a computer, server, your local desktop, or anywhere
that you would like to run this from. This doesn't have to be the server that
you will be adding the protection to. This is only for the included utilities
in this package. The computer you install this package on must have apache or
a comparable web server running and it must also have php installed that is
operated by the web server. The new directory you create should be accessible
from your web browser through the web server. Create the directory with a name
that is hard to guess so that only you can access it from the internet. If you'd
like you can also use htpasswd to password protect the directory.

Once you have a directory created, copy all the files from this package to it.
There is an index.html file included. You do not load this into your browser.
That file is there just in case someone guess the name of your directory.

The next step is to fire up a web browser and access the menu.php program in
the new directory. If you copied all these file to a directory called "blockdir"
to a website at example.com, the URL you will load is:

http://example.com/blockdir/menu.php

Now, you can run the utilities to get started. You can read the full documentation
and learn what you need to do to protect your server from unwanted countries.

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This package is designed to protect your server from unwanted countries.
It's easy to install and maintain and works very well.

The full documentation for this package is provided two ways, one is
in a .txt file named countryipblock.txt and the other is in 10 different
.html files named ipblock00.html through htblock09.html. You can install
the html files right on your website and read them there. Installation
is fully detailed in the documentation, so I won't bore you with those
details here. All the text contained in the .txt file version is exactly
the same as in the html version. Load up the .txt file into any text
editor or word processor and begin studying.

This release is listed as a beta version, but it has actually had 5 years
of continuous troublefree and efficient use by many people. In addition to
the menu and online docs, the code received some cleanup all over and a much
overdue addition has been made to accomodate both the older and newer kernels.

Enjoy blocking those countries.
