avahi question - host.local not working

[Colin Law]

On 14 October 2014 12:54, Marius Gedminas <marius at pov.lt> wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 13, 2014 at 03:05:57PM +0100, Colin Law wrote:
>> 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.
>
> In order to use Multicast DNS for name resolution (i.e. .local names)
> you need to have:
>
> - libnss-mdns package installed
> - mdns4 listed for hosts in /etc/nsswitch.conf (AFAIU this is done
>   automatically when you install libnss-mdns)

Excellent, thanks.  libnss-mdns was not installed.  Having installed
it .local name resolution works.  So the next question is whether it
should be installed in Ubuntu Mate by default.  I don't know whether it is
installed by default in Ubuntu 14.10.

Colin