I am a bit flustered here. I have several computers on my internal network ( non-public IP's ) and run my own DNS server that hosts my domain. FQDN for hosts in my domain resolve fine, but it I try just the hostname ( say mail, for mail.mydomain.org ) the DNS server does not check for a hostname in my domain, instead it just forwards the request out to my ISP's DNS servers and of course does not get an answer.

Now this is the case on all computers on my network, so either none of them are adding the default domain to the hostname in their requests, or maybe if they are not supposed to then the DNS server isn't doing it.

I modified the resolve.conf on all the systems I was testing on to :
domain mydomain.org
search mydomain.org

and restarted the network service on each system and then retested. No change in the problem. I even tried editing /etc/sysconfig/network and added the line
DOMAIN=mydomain.org

and still no change. I can't figure out what I am doing wrong. Yes, I could give up use the FQDN, or do something crazy like add all the hosts to the /etc/hosts file, but I would rather have an elegant solution.

Any ideas?

Like I said, all FQDN stuff works great, including DNS, mail services, web services, etc, its' just I can't simple type in the local host's name and have it resolve correctly. Oh, and I have searched these forums for an answer, most of them recommended the things I have already tried.

Grr, ok, I am retarded, it works with ping, but not with dig. I don't know if that is a big deal or not. I would like it to work with dig too, but my frustration level went down a few notches when I found ping worked.

Can you see which DNS server dig querrys?
It might be that ping tries the DNS servers found in your configuration till it get's an answer but that dig locks to one DNS server.