Erroneous DNS

[Gregory D Hough]

Tlug,

With the absence of a FQDN, I've always been plagued with my machines 
performing erroneous lookups. Do you know what I mean? Like when your 
freshly installed distro does its first connection to google it tries:

www.google.ca and also www.google.ca.localdomain

I have looked around and learned that by modifying /etc/host.conf to 
include trim;

order hosts,bind
trim .localdomain;.machine-name

that these lookups can be eliminated. And for the most part they have 
been. But I just put FC3 on wifey's lap-top and it refuses to honor the 
trim in /etc/host.conf. My other FC's and Drake are fine with it. What 
is supposed to be reading/interpretting this file? And in case you're 
wondering, I have placed each machines IP in /etc/hosts with their 
hostnames as an alias. Perhaps I'm missing something using dhcp. Maybe 
there is a remedy offered to clients through a dhcp server config. I 
don't know. Something in this box is as unaware as I am.

I don't understand why a notebook would behave any differently than a 
vanilla box in this regard. This 'NO SUCH NAME' is really bothersome and 
something one would expect solicited from a winbox NETBIOS.

Is this the wrong approach for a small home network? Is there a simple 
name service short of full blown bind I could incorporate internally? I 
mean I'm only dealing with three machines here and it's easy enough to 
edit the hosts files accordingly.

I'm so confused...
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