Dumb question on Hosts file - DNS migration

[James Hall-Kenney]

Hi all,

The following is a dumb question but I'm sort of obliged to ask it in
case someone has been here before.

I'm working on a project to migrate an organisation away from host files
towards a private DNS infrastructure.

One of the challenges I am hitting is the fact that legacy workstation
and host scripts make use of a host file entry "localserver".  This
entry is different depending on which site you are at.

The scale of the implementation doesn't justify any depth of hierarchy
beyond "thecoy.co.nz." ie there is no requirement for
"site.thecoy.co.nz".

Has anyone come across a smart way of dealing with this?  At the moment,
we are looking at leaving a host file behind on the workstations with a
customised localserver entry until someone fixes the scripts however
this is being frowned upon as someone has done the "hosts file bad - DNS
good" speech.

We are looking at options for DHCP to supply the local server name and
doing some global search and replaces on the scripts ... 

Any polite suggestions gratefully received.

Cheers

J.

James Hall-Kenney
mailto: jhall at sytec.co.nz