There seems to be a great deal of discussion about how to handle .local domains, which Mac OS X uses for Rendezvous. In reviewing the documentation for resolver(5), the /etc/resolv.conf file, and the /etc/resolver directory, I stumbled upon what seems to be the perfect solution.
I'm working on an Active Directory (AD) deployment for a customer that decided to use .local as the TLD for their AD namespace. To fix the problem that using .local created with my Mac OS X laptop, I created a company.local file in /etc/resolver, and populated this file with the nameservers for the company.local AD domain. This allows Mac OS X to use standard DNS to resolve company.local (or subdomain.company.local), while still allowing Rendezvous to operate as expected.
The only drawback I've seen to this approach is that the nameservers in this company.local file don't update via DHCP, so I have to update them manually.
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20040806232315819