I have a bare repo server-side, and I am able to successfully commit and push from my local machine. However, the post-receive hook is not running. Details:
Are you sure it's not running? It must be running, you just can't see it. My guess is that there is not stdout set to your ssh session at the time it's executed, so you won't ever see the output of your echo. The link suggests testing it locally, not via ssh.