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A company 'somecompany' is retiring WINS (Windows Internet Name Server) support. This means that where the IT staff used to be able to type:

ssh somehost

They now have to type:

ssh somehost.somecompany.com

WINS has been deprecated for years. Is there some other (preferably open source) way to implement name resolution, to simply type 'somehost' and have the lookup resolve to somehost.somecompany.com if the computer is on the somecompany.com network?

Typing those extra characters adds up.

Marcus
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    We call it DNS. And as far as typing the fully qualified domain name, get used to it; we aren't going back. [Here's why.](http://serverfault.com/q/626612/126632) – Michael Hampton May 08 '15 at 23:40
  • Thanks for the reference to that discussion. Pretty much confirmed what I suspected although I had hoped there was some technically sound solution. One suggestion I saw on there that I liked was adding aliases to `.ssh/config` with the short host names. – Marcus May 08 '15 at 23:57
  • A sidenote, WINS is still installed in some special case. Like to have the network neighbourhood filled for a PC over a vpn tunnel. – yagmoth555 May 09 '15 at 01:42

2 Answers2

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Configure a DNS search suffix for your systems (probably in DHCP) of somecompany.com to allow resolution using just a host's short name.

Shane Madden
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Q: Is There A Way To Implement WINS-like Functionality Without WINS?

A: Yes. Deploy a GlobalNames Zone.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc731744.aspx

joeqwerty
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