removing .local from hostname

[chriseacrett]

Say for instance I am using SSH and I wish to connect to another computer on the network, in order to do this I need to enter hostname.local. For the most part this is fine, however there are certain programs that I run that I am not able to set this so they autmoatically go looking for either {HOSTNAME} or {HOSTNAME}.{DOMAINENAME} and because of that they are unable to connect. So what I need to do is make it so that I can connect to other computers without putting .LOCAL at the end of the hostname and actually make it so that I can just put the HOSTNAME. I have searched and searched and cannot seem to find the answer...

[ynilesh]

1. You can make entry into you /etc/hosts like this,
IP Address hostname
192.168.1.1 server server.local
192.168.1.2 otherserver otherserver.local

So whenever you ssh to server/otherserver, it will take any of the name you specified.

2. Set CNAME in DNS server forward conf file
server IN A 192.168.1.1
server.local IN CNAME server

You can set multiple CNAME records.