Please help me Setup DNS

[ristretto]

For some reason, it is all working now.  I don't know why, and that makes me nervous.  I wrote this up, and then went back and tested everything to make sure I got my post written correctly, and I couldn't reproduce anything I said below.  But, I'm sending this anyway.  Perhaps someone will know why it seems so flaky….

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This should not be this hard.

I have a box running pfsense 1.2.  I have setup DHCP, and configured the machines on my LAN to get the same IP based on Mac Address when they connect through the DHCP service.  This is working.
In Services->DNS, I have the following checked

Enable DNS forwarder
Register DHCP leases in DNS forwarder
Register DHCP static mappings in DNS forwarder

I want to be able to use my machine names to communicate to the machines on my LAN.  It's not working very well.
The problems
1)  I can ping some of the machines (all but one at the moment) with hostname.domainname.  Shouldn't there be a search domain or something, so I don't have to type .domainname?
2)  One of my hosts is configured like all the others, but it isn't resolved, even with the long form.  I have checked and rechecked spelling.  It just doesn't work.
3)  I want to have aliases for the names too.  Suppose a machine is name 'bluebox' and the domain is local.  I can ping it with 'bluebox.local' but I would like to just type 'ping blu'.  I would have just set up a CNAME.  And I tried put in the table at the bottom of the DNS forwarders page, but I can't get it to work.

I restarted the firewall a couple of time.  Is there a HOWTO for this type of simple setup?

Thanks  ???