NAME

ccfilter - SiLK Plug-In to map IPs to country codes

SYNOPSIS

  rwcut --fields=scc,dcc ...

  rwsort --fields=scc,dcc ...

  rwuniq --fields=scc,dcc ...

DESCRIPTION

The Country Code plug-in provides a mapping from an IP address to two-letter, lowercase abbreviation of the country that owns the IP address. With this plug-in, an IP's country code can displayed (rwcut(1)), sorted (rwsort(1)), and counted (rwuniq(1)). (Although rwfilter(1) does not use this plug-in, it does use the same data file.)

The abbreviations used by the Country Code plug-in are those used by the Root-Zone Whois Index (see for example http://www.iana.org/cctld/cctld-whois.htm) or one of the following special codes:

--: N/A (e.g. private and experimental reserved addresses)
a1: anonymous proxy
a2: satellite provider
o1: other

Creating the Prefix Map (pamp) file that maps an IP to its country code requires the GeoIP Country(R) or free GeoLite database created by MaxMind, available from http://www.maxmind.com, as described in the MAPPING FILE section below.

OPTIONS

The Country Code plug-in makes available two additional keys to the --fields switch in the rwcut(1), rwsort(1), and rwuniq(1) tools:

scc,18: Print, sort, and/or count the flow records by the country code designation of the source IP address
dcc,19: As scc for the destination address

MAPPING FILE

To map from IP addresses to country codes you will need to create the country_codes.pmap data file and install it in the appropriate location (see the FILES section below), or specify the path to the file in the SILK_COUNTRY_CODES environment variable.

The prefix map data file is based on the GeoIP Country(R) or free GeoLite database created by MaxMind and available from http://www.maxmind.com/. We do not distribute the database nor the data file, but we provide Perl scripts that will convert the GeoIP database to the format that ccfilter.so expects.

MaxMind distributes multiple versions of their GeoIP Country database; one is a free evaluation copy that is 97% accurate. In addition, they sell versions with higher accuracy, and they offer various subscription services.

The rwgeoip2ccmap(1) program converts the MaxMind GeoIP file to the form that the SiLK tools require.

ENVIRONMENT

SILK_COUNTRY_CODES: This environment variable allows the user to specify the country code mapping file that rwfilter and the ccfilter plug-in use. The value may be a complete path or a file relative to SILK_PATH. If the variable is not specified, the code looks for a file named country_codes.pmap as specified in the FILES section below.
SILK_PATH: This environment variable gives the root of the install tree. As part of their search for the Country Code plug-in, ccfilter.so, the SiLK applications check the directories $SILK_PATH/lib/silk, $SILK_PATH/share/lib and $SILK_PATH/lib. The SiLK applications check the directories $SILK_PATH/share/silk and $SILK_PATH/share for the Country Code mapping file, country_codes.pmap.
SILK_PLUGIN_DEBUG: When set to 1, the SiLK applications print status messages to the standard error as they attempt to find and open the ccfilter.so plug-in.

FILES

SiLK applications look for the Country Code plug-in the the following locations. ($SILK_PATH is value of the SILK_PATH environment variable, if it is set; the use of /usr/local/ assumes the tool exists in the /usr/local/bin/ directory.)

  $SILK_PATH/lib/silk/ccfilter.so
  $SILK_PATH/share/lib/ccfilter.so
  $SILK_PATH/lib/ccfilter.so
  /usr/local/lib/silk/ccfilter.so
  /usr/local/share/lib/ccfilter.so
  /usr/local/lib/ccfilter.so

If the fields and/or switches are not available in an application, verify that ccfilter.so is installed in the correct location. To aid in debugging, one may invoke:

  env SILK_PLUGIN_DEBUG=1 rwcut

to print the directory paths where rwcut is looking for ccfilter.so.

The tools will look for the data file that maps IPs to country codes in the following locations:

  $SILK_COUNTRY_CODES
  $SILK_PATH/share/silk/country_codes.pmap
  $SILK_PATH/share/country_codes.pmap
  /usr/local/share/silk/country_codes.pmap
  /usr/local/share/country_codes.pmap

BUGS

Prefix map files do not support IPv6 addresses.