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Setting up a free *.city.state.us locality domain (2025)

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41–50 of 233 posts

Re: Setting up a free *.city.state.us locality domain (2025)

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

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.

St. Louis is like this as well.

Re: Setting up a free *.city.state.us locality domain (2025)

#42
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

School districts are often supersets of municipalities.

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

What a wierd phrasing. It reads to me like it excludes the possibility of it being the same.

Re: Setting up a free *.city.state.us locality domain (2025)

#43
post #8

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.

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 and, in my opinion, hell to tell people verbally ("It's Countyname County Ohio dot Gov. Yes-- all one word. The words County and Ohio are spelled out. No, not O-H-- Ohio is spelled out." >sigh<)

Re: Setting up a free *.city.state.us locality domain (2025)

#46
I have three locality domains, all with different registrars in Oregon. Two are with unique delegated locality domain registrars (think old school consultancies or ISPs that still exist) and one directly via localitymanagement.us (GoDaddy/USTLD).

One of the registrars is from an out of state operator that has been dead for three years. I tracked his widow down and had a number of cordial conversations over about 18 months. I've helped his widow renew some personal domains but she's recently told me that she's going to stop paying the hosting bill of the locality registrar and it'll shut down June 1st. I've offered to take over hosting, we'll see if she is convinced.

Several other locality users will likely also see their domains disappear once that happens as the USTLD registrar will require a notarized letter from the city/county of that domain to approve any "new" (new in their system) domains. Not easy for any mid or large sized city in the US.

I love locality domains clearly, but the bureaucracy applied since the start has piled up over the years.

I do worry that this poor Seattle ISP is going to get DDoS'ed by outsider (find an appropriate locality please if you go down this route) due to the popularity of this article, though!

RIP Jon.

Re: Setting up a free *.city.state.us locality domain (2025)

#47
post #39

Wonder if there is an equivalent to Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch

And here I was thinking Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu (https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ouKNv7GN16I)

Re: Setting up a free *.city.state.us locality domain (2025)

#49
post #36

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.archiv…

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.

What a strange time machine.

The website offered to sell unlimited dialup for me, in Ohio, using a local phone number.

I Googled that number, and it appears that it may belong to another (related? different?) time machine: https://www.panix.com/dialup/

Re: Setting up a free *.city.state.us locality domain (2025)

#50

Anyone know why some larger cities are not listed? For example, I am noticing that Oakland, CA is missing. This would have been a major city in 1992 when the list was created as well.

Someone would have had to have signed up to administer the domain during the time that signups were available. In 1992, I think interest would have been pretty low in general. And once the internet became widely known, something.city.state.us domains were pretty unlikable. About the only thing they have going for them is the low low price of (usually) free.
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