8 or 9 years ago I naively installed my SBS2003 (at the time) domain as nbname.local and now I'm using a Macbook I'm finding that the .local suffix is used for an entirely different purpose.

The answer as suggested on the Apple forums at https://discussions.apple.com/message/26885688#26885688

Is "System Preferences" ==> "Network" ==> "<select your current connection>" ==> click the Advanced... button ==> select the DNS tab and under the Search Domains field add the .local domain to the list i.e. example.local

After doing the above I could access remote desktop sessions using CoRD. This fix means I don't have to boot windows 8.1 to access the remote *.nbname.local terminal servers.