I recently bought an Archer A7 to replace an old Norton Core router I'd been using for my work-from-home environment.  The work I do requires me to network together a wide variety of devices, including those running WinCE, Linux, and Android.  I also have multiple Windows-based VMs on this network.

Now with my old Norton Core router, when you used IPCONFIG you could see it had a "Connection-specific DNS suffix" on its LAN.  The suffix, appropriately, happened to be "lan" in lowercase.  What this did was effectively create an FQDN for every device on my local network.  My PC became "PCHOSTNAME.lan", my Android device became "DeviceName.lan", and so on.  With this arrangement all my devices had visibility and connectivity to each other using this FQDN.  The local DNS resolved these names successfully.

Now, with my Archer A7, the "Connection-specific DNS suffix" is a blank string.  So all my devices are identified on the network as just the bare hostname.  While this doesn't seem to be a problem with my Windows devices (the PC, the WinCE device), for some reason the Android and Linux devices fail to resolve the bare hostname to an IP.  So both throw "unknown host" errors.  They connect without difficulty when I specify the hardcoded IP address, so the basic connectivity is definitely there -- it's just the hostname they can't resolve.

So does anyone know a way to make the Archer A7 put a nonblank string in the suffix?

Or, alternately, does anyone have any insight into what the problem might be if it's NOT the absence of a suffix?