I've re-enabled the ip2country stuff in the mirror selection pages on
the new site. I noticed that the lookup is being done from our own
database, not an external site or whois lookup as I had previously
assumed, thus the potential for failure is less than I had thought. (I'm
not sure I dare ask where that data came from!)
To satisfy Josh's thirst for data, I've also added a clickthrough logger
- every selection of a mirror results in a record being added to a table
containing the user's country, a timestamp, and the host & url they have
selected (the user's IP address is not stored). It won't tell us what
they download of course, but should give us an idea of where ppl
download from, and how many there are. In the future, perhaps we can
come up with a web interface for the entire ftp network and filesystem,
allowing us to track selection of specific files as well (the current
script will work for this as well).
Anyway - if there are any performance issues with this, it's easy to
remove again so I'm happy to give it a go. My only concern is that it is
a single point of failure of course, but at least I have physical access
to the current master server.
Regards, Dave.