White listed country blocked in Access Control

[blueshift-2025]

Hello,

anybody else got problems that white listed coutnries are blocked? I am using Zoraxy and it works quite well. But a few weeks ago, I wasn't able to access my webserver anymore using my smartphone. I just recognized that my Access Rule blocks the connection but I got my country whitelisted - if I disable the Access Rule it works fine.

Anybody else got a problem like that with a German mobile connection?

Regards

[nin-the-ninja]

Yes, we experience that too. It doesn't help to blacklist the other countries either. So we have enabled the geo-blocker on our CDN instead.

[tobychui]

Since the geodb in Zoraxy is offline, it will never be as accurate as the one provided by larger CDN companies like Cloudflare. If you need accurate geo access control, it would be better for you to do it in your CDN layer instead.

But since you already know which ISP your mobile service provider is using, you can easily just whitelist all ip from that provider as a workaround.

[blueshift-2025]

Is there no possibility to update that database? Or getting a synchronized database instead (e.g. OPNSense uses the MaxMind database and it works quite fine)? Zoraxy works amazingly well but that offline geolocation functionality is a "weak point" in my eyes and that functionality also reduces the risks.

Better reducing the amout of accessing people to a country than giving everybody on the world a possible target.

[tobychui]

As stated in the README, there is a flag for doing just that

  -update_geoip
        Download the latest GeoIP data and exit

You can schedule a zoraxy restart with geoip update once a month.

[blueshift-2025]

Hello Toby,

thank you for replying... and by the way, thank you for the really nice software :) I just checked the parameter in my docker based Zoraxy but after adding I just see that messages in teh log and Zoraxy won't start anymore:

Updating GeoIP data...
Downloading IPv4 database update...
Downloading IPv6 database update...
GeoDB update stored at: ./conf/geodb
Exiting...

You or anybody else got a hint for me? After removing the parameter all works fine again.

[tobychui]

@blueshift-2025 As the -help printout stated, what the update geoip flag does is update the geoip database and exit. You do not mix this flag with other flags in operation mode. So what you would typically do with this flag is start zoraxy with a script like this.

#!/bin/bash
./zoraxy -update_geoip
./zoraxy -port=:8000 (and other flags goes here)

So this will update the zoraxy geoip every time the zoraxy is getting restarted. Then you can use a cron job to schedule automatic restart of Zoraxy that will update the geoip for you.