^ exactly – it is possible for your machine to have a locally cached record for what your doing that got cached from elsewhere.
Really need to understand how your resolve, and what what your actually wanting to resolve to make sure your resolving the fqdn your wanting to use correctly.
a simple ping should show you what the box resolves your fqdn too, which should be the exact same thing your ssh client resolves.
as mentioned before using actual resolvable stuff as example is bad. And again I would stress if running your own local zones - I would use something that can never be resolved on the public for your tld, like .local or .lan or .localdomain -- when you use actual tlds that can be resolved public you might be having an issue where its being resolve using public dns vs locally if you don't have something setup correctly on your local nameserver.