RabbitMQ SSL Clustering on Windows Breaks rabbitmqctl - rabbitmq

Question

I'm trying to follow the steps in the RabbitMQ docs here to get clustering with SSL working on Windows. I'm noticing though that the "rabbitmqctl status" command starts failing after the environment variables defined in those steps are set. I'm getting the following error when executing "rabbitmqctl status":
Error: unable to connect to node 'rabbit#server1': nodedown
I've already configured RabbitMQ to use TLS 1.2 and have verified that it's working. I've ensured that my Erlang 18 cookie is the same in the user directory C:\users\me and C:\Windows on the machine, but the error persists, and is stopping other servers from clustering with it. The docs say that the Windows SSL Cluster setup is "Coming soon"... Here are the steps I've taken so far on server1. I think that Erlang wants forward slashes in the paths - this matches the rabbit.config SSL settings.
Combined the contents of my server\cert.pem and server\key.pem into rabbit.pem via the command "type server\cert.pem server\key.pem > server\rabbit.pem"
Created environment variable ERL_SSL_PATH and set to: "C:/Program
Files/erl7.0/lib/ssl-7.0/ebin"
Created environment variable RABBITMQ_CTL_ERL_ARGS and set to: -pa "%ERL_SSL_PATH%" -proto_dist inet_tls -ssl_dist_opt server_certfile C:/OpenSSL-Win64/server/rabbit.pem -ssl_dist_opt server_secure_renegotiate true client_secure_renegotiate true
Created environment variable RABBITMQ_SERVER_ADDITIONAL_ERL_ARGS and set to same value as RABBITMQ_CTL_ERL_ARGS
Copied the erlang cookie at C:\Windows.erlang.cookie to my local user profile directory.
Restarted rabbit using rabbitmq-service start
At this point, on server1, "rabbitmqctl status" no longer works. Attempts to try to join server2 to server1 result in a "node down" error.
Edit 1: I can't get the initial step in the docs working to ask Erlang to report its SSL directory on Windows in order to set ERL_SSL_PATH correctly. Erlang is installed at C:\Program Files\erl7.0 on my server.
Edit 2: Using werl.exe (at C:\Program Files\erl7.0\bin\werl.exe), I was able to issue a command "Foo=io:format(code:lib_dir(ssl, ebin))." and it reported the path as: c:/Program Files/erl7.0/lib/ssl-7.0/ebin. However, this doesn't seem to be the cause of the this issue since that's already what I was using.
Thanks,
Andy

Answer 1

For environment changes to take effect on Windows, the service must be
re-installed. It is not sufficient to restart the service. This can be
done using the installer or on the command line with administrator
permissions
(source)
This will do:
rabbitmq-service.bat stop
rabbitmq-service.bat remove
rabbitmq-service.bat install
rabbitmq-service.bat start
Also, if while the node you're working on is down, the other cluster nodes were running, their state might be assumed to have gone out of sync. In that case, the node might fail to start up and you might need to:
rabbitmqctl force_boot
Check the logs to confirm. (at %RABBIT_BASE%\log\rabbit#server.log)
Late answer but, hopefully this could help a searcher...