How do I troublehshoot why the RabbitMQ service won't start?

Question

Let me start out by saying I'm new to RabbitMQ. I've advanced beyond the simple Hello World apps but still a newbie on the server administration of RabbitMQ.

I'm running RabbitMQ Server 3.3.4 on Windows 7 Professional with Erlang 17.1 (win64).

Yesterday, RabbitMQ was running just fine. I was working in Visual Studio 2013 building a performance testing app to measure throughput. While developing and testing the app, I was pushing millions of messages (one test iteration had 50M messages) into the queues.

Near the end of the afternoon, the service just stopped working. I tried manually restarting the service, rebooting, uninstall / install, uninstall / delete all the remnants I could fine / install again... none of it worked.

Today, I uninstalled again, deleted all the remnants I could fine, and then installed again. Nothing is working; I cannot get RabbitMQ to start.

In the log files, [email protected] and [email protected], I found the following stacktrace, error, and crash report. Hopefully someone can help me dig a little deeper into the cause and solution.

Stack trace:
   [{rabbit_networking,record_distribution_listener,0,[]},
    {rabbit_networking,boot,0,[]},
    {rabbit,'-run_boot_step/1-lc$^1/1-1-',1,[]},
    {rabbit,run_boot_step,1,[]},
    {rabbit,'-start/2-lc$^0/1-0-',1,[]},
    {rabbit,start,2,[]},
    {application_master,start_it_old,4,
                        [{file,"application_master.erl"},{line,272}]}]


=INFO REPORT==== 8-Aug-2014::10:24:44 ===
Error description:
   {could_not_start,rabbit,
       {bad_return,
           {{rabbit,start,[normal,[]]},
            {'EXIT',{rabbit,failure_during_boot,{badmatch,noport}}}}}}


=CRASH REPORT==== 8-Aug-2014::10:24:44 ===
  crasher:
    initial call: application_master:init/4
    pid: <0.139.0>
    registered_name: []
    exception exit: {bad_return,
                        {{rabbit,start,[normal,[]]},
                         {'EXIT',
                             {rabbit,failure_during_boot,{badmatch,noport}}}}}
      in function  application_master:init/4 (application_master.erl, line 133)
    ancestors: [<0.138.0>]
    messages: [{'EXIT',<0.140.0>,normal}]
    links: [<0.138.0>,<0.7.0>]
    dictionary: []
    trap_exit: true
    status: running
    heap_size: 2586
    stack_size: 27
    reductions: 296
  neighbours:

Answer 1

Check the firewall ports. New firewall rules were pushed from corporate IT and the default epmd port (4369) was blocked in the new ruleset.

Answer 2

I had a similar issue and error messages. Maybe it's helpful to someone, here is how I was able to solve it:

1. I removed the %USERHOME%.erlang-cookie
2. I removed all files and folders in the %APPDATA%\Roaming\RabbitMQ\ folder (except the enabled_plugins file)
3. I started cmd as Administrator and ran
   • rabbitmq-service.bat remove
   • rabbitmq-service.bat install
   • rabbitmq-service.bat start

I'm not sure whether I really needed to do steps 1 and 2. Maybe the important thing is just to run these commands as administrator.