Why would your A records change depending on context? Do you have separate networks where "server.localdomain" has different IPs? The typical way to solve that is to use different sub-domains for each one.

For example if you have a home network and a testing network, you could have one on home.example.com and the other at lab.example.com, in which case your servers would be server.home.example.com and server.lab.example.com. If you use DHCP on those networks, you simply set the domain and search-domain options and you can just enter "server/" on the devices that moves between them.

You only need to register example.com with a registrar, then you can use whatever subdomains you want wherever you want.