Lets say you have two computers, one named TOM and another named JERRY. A good router will allow you to set it up so that if while you are on TOM you type:
ssh user@JERRY
You connect to JERRY without having to resort to using JERRY’s IP address.
After switching from dd-wrt to the Tomato firmware for my WT-54G, I found that there was no place to specify the local domain, so it wouldn’t resolve local hostnames properly.
I got a clue from a post on Ponderer.org. He’s setting up internal hostnames and the first line in his dnsmasq custom configuration sets his domain name. So I added this line to my dnsmasq custom config on the router
domain=cartoon
All of a sudden the hostnames start to resolve. This is of course assuming that the two computers are already setup to use the domain name cartoon.
* All computer and domain names have been made up to protect their true identites.