[rabbitmq-discuss] FYI: RabbitMQ default installation broken on Ubuntu (potential all Debian-likes)
Rene Gallati
regal at nine.ch
Fri Sep 7 14:49:45 BST 2012
Hello list,
as a service provider I was tasked to install RabbitMQ for a customer
system. No problem, it's in Ubuntu's default repository, right?
Too bad it's broken and the installation via package manager fails. And
while that may be a Ubuntu maintainer's problem the very same thing happens
if one uses the official apt-repository provided at
http://www.rabbitmq.com/install-debian.html
What breaks? Well the package installs correctly but then tries to start
the rabbitmq-server service. And this doesn't work, the service is not
startable because it has a very odd requirement: rabbitmq-server cannot be
started on current Ubuntu 12.04 LTS systems because it claims that the
"hostname is unresolvable". This is however a wrong error message, because
the hostname can be perfectly resolvable when rabbitmq-server claims this.
What is really happening is, that rabbitmq-server absolutely requires that
the hostname-part be defined as entry in /etc/hosts as name for 127.0.0.1 !
So if your system is named "foo" you have to have
127.0.0.1 localhost foo
in your /etc/hosts and then it will magically be "resolvable" and starts.
Unfortunately, the default for all modern unix systems is that the hostname
is assigned to the real IP address and not to 127.0.0.1 and this is why the
standard installation package is broken by default.
As an alternative, you can also add "NODENAME=rabbit at localhost" to
rabbitmq-server's configuration file because - look it's magic: localhost
does actually resolve to 127.0.0.1 which is what rabbitmq-server seems to
require to function. The problem with that approach is of course that the
configuration file does not exist prior to attempting to install the
package via package-manager on your system, so you have to install the
faulty installation, then add the line in the configuration file, then fix
the package-installation by rerunning in order to get to a clean state.
Since I have no experience with RabbitMQ itself, I have no idea why this is
so or what exactly is wrong on my (100% clean and default) system
configuration for this to appear. If RabbitMQ really really requires the
hostname to be mapped to 127.0.0.1 by default then this is the first
networking program with this requirement I've encountered in over 15 years
of administrating linux systems. I think it's a bug and this is why I
document this here so that it can be fixed.
Kind regards
René
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