DNS or NIS or neither?

[David McMahon]

I've got a small network of machines, a Linux DNS server, another Linux
box and a bunch of win98 machines.

I just recently configured the DNS to resolve local hostnames in my network
rather than relying on /etc/hosts (or /windows/hosts) files, however, now
every time I ping or otherwise try to resolve a local name, I get a fully
qualified domain back.  This is screwing things up, namely, the "LOCAL"
tag in my /etc/hosts.[allowdeny] files isn't recognized anymore, and ssh2
sessions into my Linux server get rejected, I assume because the hostname
no longer matches in my certificate.

What I would ideally like is a central way to resolve hosts, but resolve
them to simply hostnames.  I don't want to have to maintain 7 different
host files.  No that's not a whole lot of them, but it kills me to duplicate
things.  NIS seems like a bit of a pain as well.  I figured DNS could do
it, but it's not *quite* right.

So, CAN DNS do what I want it to do?  resolve back to simple host names
rather than FULL ON domain addys?

Thanks for your help.