SSH will not connect to hostname, only IP address.
 

Quite simply, my problem is that I want to be able to type 'ssh <hostname>' instead of 'ssh <ipaddress>'

The problem is that ssh fails to resolve the hostname and thus only successfully connects by ip address.

I do NOT want to update the /etc/hosts file every single time I connect a computer or DHCP assigns a different address to a computer, that is not an option.

I have a linksys WRT54G v6 (so no DD-WRT :mad: ) and all the computers are connected to the same switch.

This is not specifically an SSH problem, ping <hostname> does not work either, so it has something to do with the way the hostname's are resolved and/or the communication between DHCP and DNS inside the linksys box.

all that and it took you till the very end to even mention DNS... no idea what DNS is doing on the router, is it just a forwarder or do other leases get converted to DNS entries? may well be the case that if the DHCP request actually contains the hostname option the DHCP server will add the DNS data to it. outside of that, you may wish to move dns and dhcp to a different machine, maybe using something very small and compact like dnsmasq.

So to put it simply, the only way to make this possible is to create a DNS/DHCP server on a separate machine using masquerading?