Choco uninstall RabbitMQ hangs until epmd is killed

[lexi.e...@gmail.com]

Hi,

We are getting a problem when uninstalling RabbitMQ 3.10.6 with Erlang 24.0 (I have tried RabbitMQ 3.9.12 and Erlang 23.0 with the same problem. RabbitMQ 3.8.2 with Erlang 22.1 does not exhibit this issue.) 

When running the following command:

choco uninstall rabbitmq

We are getting the following result:

SERVER : Starting package removal for rabbitmq
SERVER   : Searching for existing rabbitmq chocolatey package installation
SERVER   : Existing rabbitmq installation found
SERVER   : rabbitmq removal started
Chocolatey v1.1.0
Uninstalling the following packages:
rabbitmq

rabbitmq v3.10.6

It gets stuck here but continues if you kill the epmd process while its running. Running it beforehand doesn't always work, I think it gets restarted. If you stop the uninstall process and then run it again (without killing epmd) chocolatey thinks it is uninstalled (and the RabbitMQ service will be gone) so it does seem to uninstall it, just hangs rather than finishing.

We are using PowerShell to uninstall various components on various machines so cannot kill epmd manually. We also cannot try to repeat the kill command beforehand or in parallel in PowerShell as 

running epmd in Invoke-Command just comes back with "epmd: Cannot connect to local epmd".

Stopping the RabbitMQ service before uninstallation doesn't help, even though it looks like it stops the epmd process, it seems to come back before the uninstall command is run.

I'd be really grateful if someone could help shed some light on why this has started happening? We don't want to stay on the older version as we need the various SSL/TLS fixes that have happened.

Thanks,

Lexi

[lexi.e...@gmail.com]

  Hi,

Is anyone able to shed any light on this?

Thanks,

Lexi

[Luke Bakken]

Hi Lexi,

I'm looking into this at the moment. Trying to reproduce.

[Luke Bakken]

It's going to take me a while since I don't have a "clean" Windows environment to test this with.

I do some of my RabbitMQ and Erlang development using Windows so I have many pre-existing Erlang installations. When I run choco install rabbitmq, it uses one of those so I can't reliably reproduce what you're reporting. I'll have to set up a VM (yuck).

It would be helpful to know what version of Windows you're using. I'm going to use the Hyper-V image available here:

https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/downloads/virtual-machines/

If this is urgent, paid support for RabbitMQ is available - https://www.rabbitmq.com/services.html

Thanks -

Luke

[Luke Bakken]

Hello,

I could not reproduce this issue using a clean Win 11 evaluation VM. I have attached a transcript of the command prompt output when uninstalling RabbitMQ and Erlang, as well as the full Chocolatey log.

Note that epmd does continue to run but it does not seem to interfere with uninstallation.

In your environment, you should be able to use Powershell to stop the RabbitMQ service and then kill all running epmd processes, prior to running choco uninstall. Something like:

Stop-Service -Name RabbitMQ

Get-Process -Name epmd | Stop-Process

choco uninstall rabbitmq

Thanks,

Luke