GEO IP location blocking and PHP upgrade

Heads up, I have been utilizing a configuration that has used GEO location databases that tracks the country of origin for IP addresses and have blocked all IP's that aren't in the US.

The issue is that the database is no longer maintained, and because of recent issues surrounding Red Hat and CentOS (No real explanation necessary. Those that are interested probably already know what I'm referring to) I cannot upgrade the OS distribution from CentOS 7 to anything more recent.

What this means is: If you are getting a connection forbidden (error code 403), it is likely because the IP address you are using used to belong to a country outside of the US. If you get this error, send an e-mail to me (it's my username @capitalcitygunforum.com) with the ip address you were trying from (you can get it by going to https://www.whatismyip.com/ ) and I'll see what I can do about it. With MetroNet finally bringing fiber to the premises to Tallahassee, I've noticed that they're using some IP space that used to be GEO located in the UK, so I've already added the UK IP space to the "allow" list.

Obviously, this info isn't for folks that are actively having this issue. This is a heads up that if you run across this issue in the future, you now are in-the-know on what you can do. I should be able to have things sorted for you within 48 hours of receiving your e-mail.

Also: I upgraded the software that "reads" the code for the website from version 5 to version 7.4. This really is a big change, so if y'all run into any screwy snags, please send me a PM with the exact issue you are having. That includes the specific web-page you are trying to access along with what you were trying to do. It would be helpful if you passed along both the ipv4 and ipv6 address you get from https://www.whatismyip.com/ as that would help me isolate you in the log files. If there is not enough detail in the PM to help me determine where the issue is, it will be ignored without fanfare.

For technical types: This is hosted on an OpenVZ container running CentOS 7. As you know, there is no CentOS 8, it's stream now, and there's no OpenVZ install for Rocky or other RHEL8 like distributions. The issue with this is that I use GeoIP for the GEO location, and the version I'm using has been deprecated. There is no GeoIP2 RPM for CentOS 7 without paying for access to some janky-ass repo, and I get a little antsy about building things from tarballs because it's an extra hassle to patch the system. If a more recent Linux distribution (RHEL based, not Debian) becomes available, I'll probably bring the site down for a week for a complete rebuild. Would I be able to use a Debian distro? Yes. Do I feel comfortable running a desktop-focused distribution as a server OS? I'm not a developer, so no. If this was a KVM, we wouldn't be having this discussion. I'd already be working on a rebuild, but KVM's are more expensive and I pay like $60 a year for a 4vcpu, 6gb mem, 150gb disk OpenVZ container with about 5TB of transfer every month and the host uptime has been nice and consistent. So, I'm gonna limp this lil fucker along until the hosting service makes something more recent available.

Edit: Posting new threads and the "like" button still works, so that's nice.