I run my own bind 9 within my internal private IP space (private as in RFC 1918). In my case it's a virtual cloud based environment. I like creating my own private/custom top level domain (tld) because if my the fully qualified domain names of my systems were to get leaked out to the public somehow it wouldn't constitute a security concern since they would not be resolvable.

I would like to insert a "domain" directive within the /etc/resolv.conf file of all of the nodes on my network but it doesn't seem to be working and I can't really find any documentation that says it's possible.

i.e.

domain aws
nameserver 192.168.1.1
nameserver 192.168.1.2

The goal would be to be able to perform a:

dig +short puppet

and have that request be equivalent to:

dig +short puppet.aws

Keep in mind, my problem isn't configuring bind to use custom tld's. That works fine. I can perform a `dig +short puppet.aws` and bind will return an IP address.

My question is:

Can one use the domain directive with a custom top level domain within the resolver configuration file?

While looking into this a little deeper I found that if I simply `ping puppet` ping actually attempts to ping the correct IP address for puppet.aws. I checked the /etc/hosts file to ensure there wasn't a record for puppet in there (there wasn't). So, I performed an `strace -f ping -c 1 puppet` to see what resource ping was using to acquire an IP address for "puppet". It's definitely polling the DNS server and it's adding the ".aws" portion itself without a "domain" or "search" directive in /etc/resolv.conf. Curious.