The old database format was in unknown byteorder -- if you run the
converter program yourself, you got a host order file, but if you
downloaded the preprocessed DB file (geoipdb.bin), you got a
little-endian file.
Use a new database format. Instead of having an index and a DB file,
do away with the index and let the filesystem do the indexing, using
one file per country. Also access the database files with a known
endianess type. The converter script now produces two distinct
variants (especially needed for IA-64).
All of this reduces the touched code by half.
