Lookup question

[Tony Moran]

Hi all,

I have 3 sub-domains say - horror.movie.edu, comedy.movie.edu and
sci-fi.movie.edu
Each has its own pair of primary and slave name servers.

How should I set up the configuration of each nameserver to allow
unqualified hostname lookups
for hosts in the other domains ?  - or should this behaviour be entirely
taken care of on the client -
domains  to perform the lookups on ?

the reason I ask is after a major DNS upgrade of european region
nameservers, clients are now
experiencing difficulties resolving hostnames of machines in the other
domains.  ie. before,
clients in horror.movie.edu were able to resolv a hostname in
comedy.movie.edu [smartin.comedy.movie.edu]
by simply doing a lookup on the unqualified hostname [smartin]  But now
they cant, and none of the
clients configurations have changed - only that of my local nameservers.

Even on my primary nameserver I cannot do lookups on hosts in other
sub-domains on the same level of our
'domain tree' despite having that domain listed in the search order in
my resolv.conf.

What is the norm here ?  Should this be resolved on the client side or
the nameserver side anyway ?
/Shouold/  hostnames not in the immediate domain always be looked up
using the FQDN ?

If anyone can help or fill me in here I'd really appreciate it,

Cheers,  Tony