Thanks Andy for your suggestions --- some answers and questions
interspersed below:
On Sat, Apr 16, 2016 at 10:42 PM, Andy Smith <a...@strugglers.net> wrote:
> Hi Dan,
>
> On Sat, Apr 16, 2016 at 10:14:29PM -0700, Dan Hitt wrote:
>> 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.)
>
> You may need to use "local." with a dot at the end.
>
> What doesn't work about it?
It has no effect.
So, if i do
ping second_host
i get "unknown host" from ping.
On the other hand, if i add something like
search google.com
then a command like
ping mail
really does work, and really does ping mail.google.com.
So i know that /etc/resolv.conf is being read and acted on, on every
invocation of ping, if i'm searching google.com, but if i'm searching
local, nothing whatsoever happens.
Further, "local." with a dot at the end, is no different (although i see
that it looks like you can add a dot to any host name, although
not two consecutive dots).
>
> ".local" TLD is kind of special so you may find problems anyway -
> it's used for multicast DNS (Avahi). You may be better off picking a
> different domain for your local network.
I didn't pick that name :)
And my router is a black box which i cannot touch.
Given this, is there any way to change the network's name?
>
>> 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.
>
> You can override the domain search list that your DHCP server
> provides by editing /etc/dhcp/dhclient.conf and putting in either:
>
> supersede domain-name "local."
>
> or:
>
> prepend domain-name "local."
>
> or:
>
> append domain-name "local."
>
> Depending upon whether you want to have *only* your search domains,
> your search domains *first*, or your search domains *last*,
> respectively.
>
> See man dhclient.conf for more info.
This is very useful information.
Is there any way to reload the dhclient.conf file without restarting dhclient?
I don't want to get a new lease, just have an already running dhclient reread
the file. The man page for dhclient doesn't seem to indicate how you
can get the file reread without restarting dhclient and getting a new lease.
This seems perplexing to me, because i'm not unhappy with any of the
ips i'm getting, i just want to be able to refer to hosts by shorter names.
>
> Cheers,
> Andy
Thanks again for your help!!
dan
>
> --
> http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
>
