RabbitMQ on Windows 10 - unable to connect to epmd: adress (cannot connect to host/port)

Question

I've been unsuccessfully struggling to get RabbitMQ working again on my machine for some time. It was installed and working then something went wrong. I've uninstalled and then installed v3.8.0 (with Erlang version 22).

I've run rabbitmq-service.bat start and the service starts successfully, but when I run rabbitmqctl.bat list_users I get the following error:

Error: unable to perform an operation on node 'rabbit@<my hostname>'. Please see diagnostics information and suggestions below.

Most common reasons for this are:

 * Target node is unreachable (e.g. due to hostname resolution, TCP connection or firewall issues)
 * CLI tool fails to authenticate with the server (e.g. due to CLI tool's Erlang cookie not matching that of the server)
 * Target node is not running

In addition to the diagnostics info below:

 * See the CLI, clustering and networking guides on https://rabbitmq.com/documentation.html to learn more
 * Consult server logs on node rabbit@<my hostname>
 * If target node is configured to use long node names, don't forget to use --longnames with CLI tools

DIAGNOSTICS
===========

attempted to contact: [rabbit@<my hostname>]

rabbit@<my hostname>:
  * unable to connect to epmd (port 4369) on [My host name here]: address (cannot connect to host/port)


Current node details:
 * node name: 'rabbitmqcli-7856-rabbit@<my hostname>'
 * effective user's home directory: C:\Users\<myusername>
 * Erlang cookie hash: hXRZg8Foj+FXs7DwcLF6cg==

I'm running it locally and it has been working before.

I've checked the .erlang.cookie and they're correct.

I've run the rabbitmq-plugins enable rabbitmq_management command to enable the management plugin but cannot connect to the management UI.

Answer 1

I had this same issue, and the only way I could resolve it was to

1. completely uninstall rabbitmq and erl OTP,
2. clear out the .erlang.cookie files from c:\windows\system32\config\systemprofile and c:\users\username
3. delete the erl and rabbitmq folders from Program Files
4. then reinstall everything from the ground up.

Once I did that, I used the following commands in an ADMINISTRATOR cmd

rabbitmq-service remove

rabbitmq-service install

rabbitmq-service start

And then I got a different error about authentication failed. I then copied the .erlang.cookie from the windows folder to my user folder and tried again and it worked.