Configure Ubuntu to search hostnames across domains

I am not sure if I messed up my Ubuntu system or something but it does not search hostnames within our intranet on different domains. On Windows systems, this is automatically done for you through DNS Suffix Search List which I believe is being supplied by DHCP server, not really sure. Now to get my Ubuntu machine ping other hosts on another domain we have to do two things. First we need to do this. Then configure our Ubuntu box for the search order. This can be done in two ways. GUI via System->Administration->Network, it should show something like this:

Or this can be done through the file /etc/resolv.conf. See below for an equivalent configuration.

#: nano -w /etc/resolv.conf

#<-- start here
nameserver 142.176.1.82
nameserver 142.176.1.101
nameserver 142.176.1.102
domain asia.nothing.com
search asia.nothing.com na.nothing.com

~ts