I want to access services on other machines on my home network with just their hostname. In every browser, "http://machine" fails, but adding a period in "http://machine./" works. Is there a way to avoid adding that extra period?

My setup is a router with DD-WRT w/ DNSmasq turned on, Win7 machines and several Ubuntu VMs. nslookup works fine with just hostname. Remote desktop works, but TightVNC needs the extra period. ssh needs the period. As I said, all my browsers need the extra period.

I'd prefer a solution that doesn't require manually maintaining the hosts file. Thanks.