Databases and credentials
The service keeps MaxMind's GeoLite2 databases current itself. By default it keeps three:
GeoLite2-Country, GeoLite2-ASN and GeoLite2-City, refreshed every 24 hours.
The MaxMind account
Set it on the console's Databases page, or with PUT /credentials. The license key is never
returned by a read - GET /credentials tells you which account is in force and nothing more.
It stays in force until you remove it, even when it is wrong: the service does not fall back to the environment's. A wrong credential fails on the databases page, in MaxMind's own words.
DELETE /credentials removes the stored one, and the environment's applies again.
Testing a credential separately from the network
POST /credentials/test is the geoipupdate metadata call and nothing more, so it costs a few
hundred bytes rather than eighty megabytes. Its value is that it separates two failures with
completely different fixes:
| Result | What it means |
|---|---|
| Not reached | A firewall or a proxy. It says nothing at all about the credential |
| Refused | The credential. No amount of network will help |
It also reports, per configured edition, whether MaxMind will serve that account that edition - which is how you find out that an account is fine but not entitled to City.
An empty body checks the credential already in force, and stores nothing either way.
What runs without one
Everything, at reduced depth. The service reports itself unavailable on /status and answers every
lookup unknown. It never refuses a caller because it cannot place them, because the callers
that depend on it enforce access rules and must not lose their enforcement to this service's
configuration.
Without a license
The databases are not downloaded, and any already on disk are kept but not consulted. A license installed later starts a download straight away. See Licensing.
An edition the account is not entitled to
A refused edition is recorded against that edition on the page, not treated as a failed sync - so a Country-only account does not look like a broken service.