[rabbitmq-discuss] effectively using -setcookie

[srd]

Hi,
I'm using rabbit 3.0.4 on a centos system.

Suppose I have a cluster I want to stand up and want to make it easy without having to copy the cookie file to all the nodes.

If I run as rabbitmq the command: rabbitmq-server -setcookie pigcat &
It appears to start fine however I have noticed a couple of things.
the .erlang_cookie doesn't update.

If I later run rabbitmqctl cluster_status  I can't to communicate with the node because I cannot set the cookie to my desired cookie.

So the question is, how does one effectively maintain a cluster using the -setcookie option?

I tried looking at the rabbitmqctl and rabbitmq-server script files but none of them hit the erl application directly.  In the docs it briefly mentions one could modify the scripts so that erl is started with a specific cookie.
I'd like to be able to do this but do not see where it would be that I need to augment so I can ensure the cookie is always set to a known value when accessing the node.

Does anyone have an example of how / what scripts need to be modified?

Thanks in advance.