Regional Services provided by PSC
The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center provides three types of DNS services to sites in our region. They are:
DNS Delegations
The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center was chosen by the US Domain Registration department of ISI.EDU to delegate several educational domains under PA.US. These domains are K12.PA.US, CC.PA.US, and TEC.PA.US. and they are reserved for K-12 schools, Community Colleges, and Technical Schools (respectively) across the state of Pennsylvania. There is no fee associated with these domains.
In addition, when the US Domain Registration department decided to set up "locality" domains (county names which double for city names when a match occurs), we applied for and received delegation responsibilities for several in Western Pennsylvania.
"Delegating domains" means that we supply the addresses of the nameservers for a given domain when queried, and redirect requests for additional information to the appropriate nameserver. A nameserver is the machine which serves all the information on a domain, including addresses of listed hosts.
DNS Primary and Secondary Nameservice
We offer limited Primary and Secondary nameservice to several organizations, including educational establishments, city governments, research organizations, etc. It is required that all domains be served by two physically distinct and geographically separated nameservers, but smaller organizations (such as public school districts) sometimes have problems acquiring such "Secondary nameservice". In these cases we try to direct them to someone who can help, and sometimes offer such service ourselves.
Technical Support
In general, we do not offer technical support to those sites not directly connected to/through us. However, when we receive queries and or problem reports, we try to help the technical contact understand the problem and to answer many of their questions before directing them to the proper channels for resolution.