dnsmasq & Tomato - Elminate the need for a trailing dot for name resolution

I realize that a trailing dot after a hostname is technically "correct", but it's a pain in the butt to type and is unintuitive for non-technical users. I had DDWRT on a Linksys router of mine many, many years ago, and it resolved local hostnames via dnsmasq without the trailing dot. However, having just installed Tomato onto my Asus N66U, trailing dots are always required. For example, "ping router" doesn't work, but "ping router." does.

Assuming my router's hostname is "router", I'd like dnsmasq to allow me to type "ping router", "http://router/", etc and have it work as expected. Does anyone know how to configure dnsmasq to do so?

Modifying my HOSTS file is not acceptable, and I've shut off NetBIOS over TCP/IP completely (I'm slowly transitioning to a Linux-only network), so that is not an option for numerous reasons. Thanks.

So in your previous setup I suspect your fully qualified domain name was something more then just the bare hostname. Perhaps router.local., or router.lan. or something else like that. With a fully qualified name defined, you could then the DNS search path setting for your network via your DHCP server.

So your routers hostname would be router.local., and your DNS resolvers would have a search patch of local. That when your clients perform a lookup for router, the DNS client will automatically append the .local. and then successfully resolve the address.

If you are using DNSMasq as both your DHCP and DNS server making this happen should be trivial.

If you found this thread due to a similar problem without using ddwrt, but using dnsmasq on linux and using windows hosts that query it, requiring you to add a "." to make it actually do a dns lookup (mostly a problem with local domains/hostnames for intranet sites or LAN resourses) here is the solution:

For statically assigned addresses you have to add a "." to the "Append these DNS suffixes" under "Advanced TCP/IP Settings". Alternatively you can add a domain name here as well.

For dynamically assigned addresses (DHCP) you have to add a "." to automatically be added to all DNS queries. Similar to the static settings, but in your DHCP server settings.

Hope this helps, there is not much info out there on this problem.