“node with name ”rabbit“ already running”, but also “unable to connect to node 'rabbit'”

Question

Rabbitmq server does not start, saying it\'s already running:

$: rabbitmq-server
Activating RabbitMQ plugins ...
0 plugins activated:

node wit         


        

Answer 1

This issue can be caused by two issues:

1. Rabbit is already running on the server. If that is the case, use the answer you found of killing the currently running process (ps aux | grep rabbit | grep -v grep)
2. You have changed the IP address of your machine but not changed the /etc/hosts file to reflect the new IP address of the machine.

The more common of the issues is the first, but the harder to find is the second (especially if you have rabbit running on the other machine. If rabbit is installed on the other machine it will look at the old IP address and would see another machine already running rabbitmq and give you the same error. This has caused me grief in the past.