Walking in Light With Christ - hip0's personal blog on System Administration, Free Software, Computer Security and Religion

In order to be able to use the geoip function geoip_time_zone_by_country_and_region I had to upgrade the default debian lenny version of php5-geoip (1.0.3-1) to the latest 1.0.7 aviable as a pecl package.

In order to upgrade to the newer php-geoip 1.0.7 I had to first remove the old php5-geoip version installed through debian package manager.

debian-server:~# dpkg -r php5-geoip


Notice that if you don't do a apache restart after removing the php5-geoip, if your php scripts has something that deals with php geoip then your Apache server is gonna fail until restarted, therefore to omit the failed Apache issues and possible downtimes issue a apache restart before continuing.

debian-server:~# /etc/init.d/apache2 restart


Then I tried installing the newer php5 geoip using pecl
thus I issued:

debian-server:~# pecl install geoip


.... But guess what the built failed with an error:

checking for geoip files in default path... not found

To deal with the php geoip compile issue I had to install:
libgeoip-dev - Development files for the GeoIP library

debian-server:~# apt-get install libgeoip-dev


Then again I installed using the pecl interface pecl php pcakage install interface.

debian-server:~# pecl install geoip


Thereafter I had to also include extension=geoip.so in php.ini

debian-server:~# echo "extension=geoip.so" >> /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini


Needless to say for the new geoip module to take effect you need to restart your Apache webserver.

debian-server:~# /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Now this will enable the unexisting geoip_time_zone_by_country_and_region function in the earlier releases than 1.0.4 of php geoip.
So your geoip_time_zone_by_country_and_region should be ready to use from your php scripts from now on.