Resolving local host names

[Kevin Darcy]

Tacking domains onto the end of a name in an attempt to guess what the
fully-qualified name is, is generally considered the function of
resolvers, not nameservers. Have you tried defining "fakedomain" as the
default domain for all of the clients (I believe this is referred to as
a "domain suffix" in WinTelLand)?

I hesitate to even mention this, but... If you're on a completely
isolated network with NO HOPE of ever having Internet connectivity, then
you could throw these names into an internal root zone. But this is
obviously not very scalable, is likely to lead to naming conflicts if
you grow beyond a trivial size, and mostly defeats the purpose of using
DNS at all (why not just replicate hosts files in that case?).


- Kevin

innocent_smith at my-deja.com wrote:

> Is there any way to use DNS to resolve local host names entered by
> themselves, no domain?  I configured a fake domain and added local
> hosts to it and everything works just fine as long as I use
> myhost.fakedomain however, I'd really like to to be able to resolve
> local names all by themselves like I can with host file.  I tried
> adding a zone "" but that didn't work.  Any way to do this with DNS?