## Using alternate GeoIP databases
The server comes with a built-in geoip lookup to resolve user IP addresses to the country the IP address is assigned to (as seen by the country flags in the client), provided by IP2Location. TeamSpeak Server 3.13.0 also features optional support for specifying your own GeoIP database in the standard MMDB format. It is your responsibility to source and maintain this database. The server does not make any calls to third-party web services, and only works with 'offline' databases.
Note there is no way to use both databases - it's either an external one OR the built-in IP2Location.
### Requirements
Use of this feature requires libmaxminddb to be installed (this can be found in the package library of most Linux distributions). For Windows, you can find a maxminddb.dll in the 'redist' folder - please move or copy this into the parent folder.
It is not supported on FreeBSD or macOS.
### Usage
To use this, first find yourself a database in MMDB format, and use the `mmdbpath` command line parameter to specify the path. Please make sure you store it somewhere the TeamSpeak server has access to. If it was found, the logs should say something like:
```sh
>./ts3server mmdbpath=geoip-lite.mmdb
...
2020-07-07 10:06:02.075369|INFO |GeoIP | |mmdb database found and will be used for geoip lookups
```
If there is a problem, the server will warn you and 'fall back' to the built-in implementation, as you can see here:
```
>./ts3server mmdbpath=FAKEPATH
...
2020-07-07 10:06:57.759774|WARNING |GeoIP | |mmdb database open returned failure (check mmdbpath) : Error opening the specified MaxMind DB file
2020-07-07 10:06:57.759812|WARNING |GeoIP | |falling back to standard implementation
```
Both 'lite' and 'full' IP databases should work, with 'full' databases perhaps offering greater precision - but remember that GeoIP is never 100% accurate.