[rabbitmq-discuss] RabbitMQ distaste for symlinks?

Fri Mar 2 11:14:57 GMT 2012

Hi Pieter.

On 01/03/12 18:48, Pieter de Zwart wrote:
> We had something weird happen overnight. Our setup dictates that rabbit
> run under /var/lib/rabbitmq, a partition that only has 9G of disk space.
> We opted to symlink
> /var/lib/rabbitmq/mnesia/rabbit at frpp-urb0000/msg_store_transient to
> /rabbitmq/msg_store_transient, which is hosted on a separate partition
> with 600G of space instead. Somehow, overnight, the symlink went missing,
> and rabbit started writing back to /var, filled up the disk space, and
> took our primary broker down (thank god for HA and redundancy).
>
> We looked through the access logs and we cant find any indication of any
> user logging in and/or touching the symlink, which brought up the
> question: does rabbit do any file manipulation of the transient message
> store? Maybe delete it when its empty and then recreate it, or something?
> I know, I am grasping for straws...

Yes, RabbitMQ will delete and recreate the transient message store on 
startup, so if someone restarted it, that's what you'd see.

In general, I would suggest you symlink /var/lib/rabbitmq/mnesia into 
the bug partition - Rabbit will tend to view anything under that as 
being its domain.

Cheers, Simon

-- 
Simon MacMullen
RabbitMQ, VMware