Setting up a free *.city.state.us locality domain
185 points by speckx 2 hours ago | 41 comments

kiddico 2 hours ago
Seeing the *.k12.oh.us in the delegated subdomains brought me back to highschool. When I was little I always wondered why the city name was before k12. Didn't know it was structured like that everywhere.
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EvanAnderson 43 seconds ago
I managed a couple ".k12.oh.us" domains back in the day. The employees hated the domain in their email addresses, but I found it very logical. I saw all kinds screwed-up addresses in bounce messages forwarded to my company address when "can't email people in the District" tickets got sent my way (a lot of "districtname.oh.k12.us", etc). I guess it wasn't so simple for "normies".

One of the schools ended up using a ".com" domain that was one character longer than their ".k12.oh.us" domain but easier to tell people verbally (I guess).

I also managed a "co._countyname_.oh.us" domain, too. Again, universal hatred for the domain in email addresses, and again I found it logical and reasonable.

The County government ended-up getting a ".gov" domain that was 5 characters longer than their "co._countyname_.oh.us" domain.

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anamexis 39 minutes ago
School districts are often supersets of municipalities.
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runjake 38 minutes ago
This is the correct answer.

From RFC 1386, Section 3.3.1:

  "Public schools are usually organized by districts 
  which can be larger or smaller than a city or county."
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1386#page-12
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throw_await 3 minutes ago
What a wierd phrasing. It reads to me like it excludes the possibility of it being the same.
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MithrilTuxedo 34 minutes ago
mayo.k12.sc.us was my high school. It seems a shame they're not still using it.
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T3RMINATED 57 minutes ago
Our school and town dropped all the .mi.us domains and they have their own domains now, why would they do that? I know it used to be k12 too.
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xp84 11 minutes ago
They nearly all did that because the average person never figured out how the DNS hierarchy worked, and many of them never even got comfortable with the idea of having more than one dot in a domain (with the exception of a “www.” prefix). So it was easier for each district to just make up a random .com or .org.
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ge96 9 minutes ago
Wonder if there is an equivalent to Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch
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CalRobert 50 minutes ago
Seeing the list of contacts for delegated subdomains reminds me of a time when there were a lot more local ISP's. Inreach.com for Stockton, lodinet (possibly an ISP?) for Lodi..

But the one that really shocked me was https://www.snowcrest.com/mysc/ - which seems to still be up and running?? I wonder if the login page for webmail (ISP-provided email was a thing! And even hosting space!) still works.

https://web.archive.org/web/20090909141302/http://neustar.us...

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nstory 15 minutes ago
Here in the Boston area, the first commercial ISP https://www.theworld.com/ appears to still be up and running, and is similarly frozen in time.
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_joel 48 minutes ago
And now it's getting well stress tested
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CalRobert 47 minutes ago
Maybe you should try one of the other numbers at https://www.snowcrest.com/dialup/numbers.php - most support v.92!
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cormorant 2 hours ago
Some similarities to *.<lastname>.name -- one of which is that the Public Suffix List thinks you're part of a single site with others you have no control over. Another is the weird registration procedure, but this one is weirder!
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razakel 13 minutes ago
It's not a public suffix. They've allowed second-level registrations for a while.
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dawnerd 50 minutes ago
I want to set one up now and use it to call out the city board members taking kickbacks from flock.
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pugworthy 46 minutes ago
This is probably not the kind of approach to taking out new domain names you should encourage. A lot of other causes might think this is their way to set up an "official" representation of their strongly held political beliefs, and I think you can imagine where that might go with some groups.
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vasco 34 minutes ago
"Don't use your free speech because other people might use theirs in ways you don't like"
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prepend 40 minutes ago
Why would city board members care what your domain name is?
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dawnerd 30 minutes ago
Oh they probably don't. But it might annoy them slightly if the foia docs were hosted there.
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ltsSmitty 25 minutes ago
Great instructions! Well, I'll follow up and let you know if Gainesville, FL responds!
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Bender 47 minutes ago
Will WHOIS requests leak my address?

Nope. Even though you must supply your address in the registration form, a WHOIS request for your locality domain will only show information about the registrar.

Perhaps I am misunderstanding their statement but unless something recently changed this is not true. The .US TLD does not permit whois privacy services. The full legal name and address of the registrant will be shown in my experience and I could not find a registrar that would deviate from this.

Are they offering delegation of sub-domains of some domains they purchased perhaps? The example they gave did not suggest this if that is so. If that is the case then whois does not really apply unless they are giving different answers in their whois for sub-domains assuming their whois would be queried.

That is why I opted for .org for a small town that I operated a website for in my spare time. When using a .US one can register it in the name of a company or the city can register it themselves through their own government to avoid a persons personal information being listed. Ensure auto-renew is enabled when assisting a city government as people come and go. Pay as far in advance for as many years as possible.

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DrewADesign 20 minutes ago
Maybe that’s only for registering primary domains and not subdomains?
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Bender 17 minutes ago
Maybe that’s only for registering primary domains and not subdomains?

That is true and would explain my confusion on this matter if they have some list of apex domains they are dynamically creating sub-domains for. Honestly if this is the case I would avoid participating in this. This puts the control of the domain (sub-domain) in their hands for your city. Cities and states can already use sub-domains of their countries .gov domain structure which I realize is full of its own issues but that's another topic all together.

This project would likely be shut down the first time someone complains to their government about one of the sites.

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giobox 27 minutes ago
Remarkable, I had absolutely no idea I could do this in my state. I suspect this post is going to cause a spike in applications as folks like me discover we can have one for free.
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aquir 30 minutes ago
I wish there would be something like this in the UK but with county instead of state. E.g. swindon.wiltshire.uk or sheffield.southyorkshire.uk
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pmcgoron 33 minutes ago
> FL HOTDOG.MIAMI.FL.US. arodriguez@houseit.com

I'm very confused by this entry. There isn't even a miami subdomain, just a Dade subdomain.

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js2 16 minutes ago
Delegation can happen at a dot, but does have to happen at each dot. In this case the referral sequence is:

root-servers.net -> cctld.us -> localitymanagement.us -> miami.fl.us

And it ends there with an NXDOMAIN. Unsurprisingly, a list archived in 2009[^1] is no longer accurate.

[^1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20090909141302/http://neustar.us...

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kmoser 22 minutes ago
> 5. Date Operational......: You can use your birth date here.

Yikes, no!

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beezle 2 hours ago
I had one, registered I think in 1991, back in the uucp bang days. Had to give it up due to changes in requirements and IIRC Nustar being a real pain. Would like to get it back but no desire to jump through hoops to do so.
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TrevorFSmith 2 hours ago
Definitely keep in mind that right or wrong, these hosts are unusual as far as most commercial services are concerned and it can reveal annoying edge cases in their software.
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thrill 58 minutes ago
Aren’t there several states that have the same city name repeated within the state? I think there’d need to be a county delineator here too.
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TallGuyShort 55 minutes ago
That gets extremely complicated. My town straddles the border between 2 counties. And you can't trivially have subdomains for counties and cities at the same level, because Wyoming has a Laramie city but it's in Albany County, not the neighboring Laramie County.

Did this just inspire the next "Falsehoods programmers believe about... Federalism"?

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wat10000 45 minutes ago
Virginia cities are independent, not within counties. And there's both a Fairfax City and Fairfax County. Making things even more confusing, the county seat is Fairfax City despite the city not being part of the county. The county has fairfaxcounty.gov while the city has fairfaxva.gov.

There are a handful of other independent cities in the US, but the vast majority are in Virginia.

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georgel 7 minutes ago
St. Louis is like this as well.
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DrewADesign 17 minutes ago
The edge cases always make things so difficult:

Manhattan: New York County

Brooklyn: Kings County

The Bronx: Bronx County

Queens: Queens County

Staten Island: Richmond County

All New York City. Same municipality, 5 counties.

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kmoser 8 minutes ago
There's also the edge case of the (unofficial) 6th borough of NYC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixth_borough
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tialaramex 50 minutes ago
If you have hierarchical naming, which DNS does, then the problem of name clashes is always a problem for whoever sits above those names and they can resolve it however they like.

If your state thought it was a good idea to have two cities named "Star City" that's on them to resolve however they like. Trial by endurance for the city mayor? Draw lots? Everybody in the state votes? Not my monkeys, not my circus.

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runjake 52 minutes ago
You're right, but typically, when two towns in a state share a name, only one is an incorporated city at most. The other, or both, are usually unincorporated communities. Normally, unincorporated communities do not receive a city.state.us locality domain.
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uneekname 2 hours ago
See also: http://nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us/locality.html

Edit: already linked in the article! That's what I get for not reading to the end!

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odie5533 2 hours ago
Seems like the primary use for locality domains is to explain to others how to get locality domains.
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