[rabbitmq-discuss] FYI: RabbitMQ default installation broken on Ubuntu (potential all Debian-likes)

[Simon MacMullen]

On 10/09/2012 12:31PM, René Gallati wrote:
> So it boils down to a race condition, or rather a wrong sequence of
> installation / setting up which causes a failure in the start of
> rabbitmq-server and not a broken package/installer. We have a relative
> restrictive default firewall policy and it just bit back.
>
> Sorry to having caused a fuzz.

Ah cool, thanks for getting back to us.

> While trying to fix this I found that I basically have to allow all
> traffic on $extip since it appears that beam.smp is binding 2 random
> ports and needs to be accessible there, is that correct? Ie. just
> allowing 4369 and 5672 the latter of which btw. is the only port it
> binds as ipv6 is not enough. Rabbitmq starts but hangs while starting
> and the init script never returns until I allow access to the randomly
> bound ports. Can I pre-set these ports with some configuration directive
> or are they truly random?

These are the ports for Erlang inter-process communication, you can lock 
them down a bit more as documented here:

http://www.rabbitmq.com/clustering.html#firewall

e.g. a RabbitMQ config file like:

[{kernel, [{inet_dist_listen_min, 10001},
            {inet_dist_listen_max, 10001}]}].

to lock it down to a single port.

Cheers, Simon