I'm hoping this will be simple, I ran into this issue before but don't remember what I did to resolve it. I'm setting up a DNS in my house, it almost works. Nslookup returns the correct values but when I try to ssh to a system I have to add a period to the end of the system name for ssh to work. here is some of the information from named.conf options { directory "/var/named"; dump-file "/var/named/data/cache_dump.db"; statistics-file "/var/named/data/named_stats.txt"; /* * If there is a firewall between you and nameservers you want * to talk to, you might need to uncomment the query-source * directive below. Previous versions of BIND always asked * questions using port 53, but BIND 8.1 uses an unprivileged * port by default. */ // query-source address * port 53; }; zone "43p." IN { type master; file "43p_0.db"; }; zone "router." IN { type master; file "router_0.db"; }; zone "41t." IN { type master; file "41t_0.db"; }; Here is an example of the zone files $TTL 1H @ SOA 43p.home.local. root.dell.home.local. ( 2 3H 1H 1W 1H ) NS 43p.home.local. A 192.168.1.50 Thanks