In the past several months it sometimes just so happened, that the geoipupdate tool, available on many GNU/Linux systems to update MaxMind's GeoIP databases just failed. It exited fine but left a corrupt database, unreadable to the application depending on it. In this particular environment, GeoIP lookup is a mission-critical dependency, so it was time to come up with a little cron/logger/geoipupdate assisted bash magic, to update MaxMind's GeoIP Databases automatically and with two fallback safeties, in case the new DB is corrupt or the download failed somehow.

It performed very well for the last several weeks, never raised an alert and is published now, as it might be useful for someone else out there, confronted with the same problem. You could spend your time elsewhere, instead of re-inventing something that is already here and which doesn't rely on alerts, to get a human's attention but tries to fix it by itself in an automated process:

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