DB effciency

straytalk · New Member Joined: Aug 13, 2006 Posts: 14

Alright this isnt related to speed and execution effciency but rather size... So Im a bit rusty with my php work and decided since I might be prone to errors and was going to be doing work that involved my DB i decided to pretty much make a mirror of my site and copy the DB so my test site would have its own exact copy DB and id be able to mess around and not have my normal site explode. So I planned on exporting and reimporting under a new name. I found the size of my DB to be 5 megs which in my opinion is a pretty d*** huge text file. So I went poking around to find up what was sucking up so much space and its this table called nuke_nsnst_ip2country yanking around 3.4 megs or so.

My question is thus, is this table critical to the security and/or functionality of my website? If no, then what would the ramifications of dropping this table?

I have dont a little research by poking around and I know with sentenial I can block country wide IP ranges, but there could obviously be far more to this then I can see skin deep. Normally I'm all for the screw up and fix it your self learning method but this is a just a situation I'd like to know a bit more about befor I start issusing any drop commands to my SQL server.

Any concret information would be most welcomed!

Thanks,
Straytalk

montego · Posted: Mon Sep 04, 2006 7:54 am

For this table, bring it over but not the data for it. You will not need it for a test site unless it is exposed to the internet, then, in that case, using your latest NukeSentinel IP2Country data from

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import only the IANA Reserved data.

If you then find yourself needing to ban an entire country, just import that country's data and then use it to ban.

fkelly · Posted: Mon Sep 04, 2006 7:57 am

I would recommend that you just "put up with" the size of the IP2country table. It's a huge convenience and for what I'm reading in Forums it is becoming more and more "integrated" into Sentinel so that some things may not work right without it. In terms of convenience a lot of the hackers seem to be concentrated in a few countries and being able to ban them easily is a lot better than dealing with individual IP's or even a bunch of ranges.

If you look in the Ravennuke distribution you'll see that the IP2country files are broken up into a series of compressed (gz) files, probably for just the reason you mentioned (the size of the text file). What you might want to do is dump all the tables except those with the nsnst "prefix" into one dump text file and then dump the nsnst ones into another. In some cases I've even separated the forum tables into a separate text file too since those can get to be pretty big once you have more than a handful of postings. So long as all the tables are accounted for you may find the whole process to be more manageable with a few text files than one "huge" one.

Edit -- oops: Montego and I were typing at the same time. I think he's got the better answer on this (unless he's editing his right now and saying I do in which case I agree with him). You can keep my approach in reserve in case you need it at some other time.

straytalk · New Member Joined: Aug 13, 2006 Posts: 14

Alrighty thanks for the info. I'll just deal with it for my site I guess and just not import it for my test site.