avahi question - host.local not working

[Colin Law]

I am playing with Ubuntu Mate 14.10 in order to see whether it should
be my flavour of choice on machines where the graphics h/w is not
unity compatible.  I have a problem with avahi (I think), I like to
investigate bugs a bit before reporting so I am trying to understand
what is going on.

The symptom is that from the mate machine (named rabbit) if I say, for example,
ping owl.local            where owl is another machine on the network,
it says ping: unknown host owl.local.  This works ok between other
machines on the local network.  I can ping rabbit.local ok from other
machines.  On rabbit avahi-browse -at    shows, for owl
+   eth0 IPv4 owl [<mac address>]                       Workstation
      local
which appears to be ok.

avahi-daemon is running and /etc/avahi/avahi-daemon.conf is the same
as on other machines.

Does anyone know what might be causing access to other_machines.local
from the mate m/c not to work?

I can't find an existing bug report on launchpad.

Cheers

Colin