rabbitmqctl Error: unable to connect to node rabbit@myserver nodedown

Question

I am running RabbitMQ v3.3.5 with Erlang OTP 17.1 on Windows 2008 R2. My Dev and QA environments are stand-alone. My staging and production environments are clustered.

Answer 1

Hostnames are case-insensitives when you are trying to resolve them. For example, LOCALHOST and localhost are the same host.

However, when Erlang constructs the name of a node (eg. rabbit@ in the case of RabbitMQ), this name is case-sensitive. So rabbit@LOCALHOST and rabbit@localhost are two different node names, even if they run on the same host.

Recently, we (the RabbitMQ team) found out that, on Windows, the node name constructed for RabbitMQ was inconsistent. Therefore, sometimes, RabbitMQ started as a Windows service could be named rabbit@MYHOST but rabbitmqctl would try to reach rabbit@myhost and fail.

Since RabbitMQ 3.6.0, the node name should be consistent.