I am trying to set up a RabbitMQ cluster on Windows servers, and this requires using shared Erlang cookie file. According to the documentation, all I need to do is to ensure that the root directories on different machines contain the same .erlang.cookie file. So what I did is found these files on both machines and overwrote them with the same shared version.
After that all rabbitmqctl commands failed on the machine with new file version with "unable to connect to node..." error message. I tried to restart RabbitMQ Windows service, but still rabbitmqctl complained. I even reinstalled RabbitMQ on that machine, but then .erlang.cookie was reset back to the old version. Whenever I tried to use new version of cookie file, rabbitmqctl failed. When I restored an old version, it worked fine.
Basically I am stuck and can not proceed with cluster setup until I resolve this issue. Any help is appreciated.
UPDATE: Received an answer from RabbitMQ: "rabbitmqctl will pick up the cookie from the user home directory while the service will pick it up from C:\windows. So you will need to synchronise those with each other, as well as with the other machine."
This basically means that cookie file needs to be repaced in two places: C:\Windows and current_user.
You have the above correct. The service will use the cookie at C:\Windows and when you use rabbitmqctl.bat to query the status it is using the cookie in your user directory (%USERPROFILE%).
When the cookies don't match the error look like
C:\Program Files (x86)\RabbitMQ Server\rabbitmq_server-2.8.2\sbin>rabbitmqctl.bat status
Status of node 'rabbit@PC-FOOBAR' ...
Error: unable to connect to node 'rabbit@PC-FOOBAR': nodedown
DIAGNOSTICS
===========
nodes in question: ['rabbit@PC-FOOBAR']
hosts, their running nodes and ports:
- PC-FOOBAR: [{rabbit,49186},{rabbitmqctl30566,63150}]
current node details:
- node name: 'rabbitmqctl30566@pc-foobar'
- home dir: U:\
- cookie hash: Vp52cEvPP1PukagWi5S/fQ==
There is one more gotcha for RabbitMQ cookies on Windows... If you have a %HOMEDIR% and %HOMEPATH% environment variables (as we do in our current test environment, and sets homedir above to U:\), then RabbitMQ will get the cookie there and if there isn't one it makes one up and writes it there. This left me banging my head on my desk for quite a while when trying to get this working. Once I found this gotcha it was obvious the cookie files were the problem (as documented) they were just at an odd location (not documented AFAIK).
Hope this solves someones pain setting up RabbitMQ Clustering on Windows.
来源：https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10121706/setting-up-rabbitmq-cluster-on-windows-servers