In my local network, the machines generally know each other by names like
first_host.local
second_host.local
third_host.local
...
So if i'm on first_host, i can ssh to second_host with
ssh my_account@second_host.local
and i can ping second_host by
ping second_host.local
I would like to drop the '.local' because it's an extra six characters
with absolutely no value.
In principle, i think it should be possible to by just adding
search local
to my /etc/resolv.conf, but this absolutely does not work. (I imagine that
local is a really magic name in some contexts but not very magic in others.)
Furthermore, /etc/resolv.conf doesn't want to be written, as it
says it is generated automatically, so even if it worked, it wouldn't
be such a good solution.
I can sort of fix the situation by editing ~/.ssh/config and adding lines
Host second_host
Hostname second_host.local
but this has the disadvantage that i have to do it for every host on
the network, and it only affects ssh --- ping and presumably every
other command (naturally!) do not consult this file.
(I don't have any influence over my router which comes from
my service provider, but i wouldn't want to change it even if
i could, since i'm just asking my own machine to intercept
a name like second_host and convert it to second_host.local
before processing further.)
Thanks in advance for any clues or references to man pages
or even other mailing lists.
dan
