avahi question - host.local not working

[Tom H]

On Mon, Oct 13, 2014 at 10:05 AM, Colin Law <clanlaw at gmail.com> 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.
>
> 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.

So avahi is running but you can't resolve .local hostnames on rabbit.

What does "grep hosts /etc/nsswitch.conf" return on rabbit?

How about, on rabbit:
avahi-resolve -4 --address ip_address_of_owl
avahi-resolve -4 --name owl.local