[tonyyarusso]

I currently have five machines running Ubuntu on my home network, connected to a Linksys WRT54GL running DD-WRT v24 SP1 VPN. They are getting IP addresses via DHCP. Avahi (a zeroconf implementation) announces their presence through mDNS, and by default assigns the machines the .local domain. The current situation is that from any of the client machines I can successfully locate the others by doing 'ping <machinename>.local', but just 'ping <machinename>' gives "unknown host". I have tried various configurations with and without local in the local domain and WAN domain in the DD-WRT configuration, but none seems to have had an effect so far. I should also mention that three of the client machines are using Network-Manager and two are not, and I have seen "search local" in /etc/resolv.conf with no effect. I would like to be able to ping with just the base hostnames for convenience.

On a slightly related note, I also have two remote machines (a VPS and a web server) that I would like to give aliases to on my router, eg. such that 'ping timmins' will resolve to my VPS (but by its FQDN, not IP, as the IP may change occasionally, but the domain name will update automatically). Any help defining those would be much appreciated as well.