Important Geolocation Changes in ntop Products

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ntop products have been using geolocation databases provided by MaxMind for a long time, to augment network IP addresses with geographical coordinates (cities, countries) and information on the Autonomous Systems. ntop have been freely packaging and redistributing such databases in ntopng-data.

Unfortunately, new privacy regulations, such as GDPR and CCPA, place restrictions that impact our ability to continue distributing  databases in ntopng-data. Reasons are the same that have impacted MaxMind ability to do the redistribution and are explained in detail at the following page.

Hence starting late December 2019, in order to continue using geolocation in ntop software, you are required to register for a MaxMind account and obtain a license key in order to download  geolocation databases. Package ntopng-data continues to exist, however, it no longer carries databases but just the MaxMind download helper geoipupdate which fetches databases from MaxMind servers using the license key.

Detailed instructions to continue using geolocation databases in ntop products are available here . The transition is pretty straightforward: there is nothing special to do, and everything will continue to function automatically and transparently once you have obtained a license key.