Fixing rabbitmq after switching servers

I ran into some backend headaches with django, celery, and rabbitmq over the weekend. The EC2 instance I was using crashed, so I had to switch servers. When I did, rabbitmq-server, which the broker behind celery, which is the task queue behind django -- broke.  The broker broke.  And considering that there are still parts of django I'm wrapping my head around, chasing down a system error three levels deep was quiet the pain.

Happily, I got some very good help from the rabbitmq-discuss list:

The database RabbitMQ uses is bound to the machine's hostname, so if you copied the database dir to another machine, it won't work.  If this is the case, you have to set up a machine with the same hostname as before and transfer any outstanding messages to the new machine.  If there's nothing important in rabbit, you could just clear everything by removing the RabbitMQ files in /var/lib/rabbitmq.

I deleted everything in /var/lib/rabbitmq/mnesia/rabbit/ and it started up without trouble.  Hooray!

I also got a warning about using outdated software:

1.7.2 is a *very* old version of the broker.  You should really upgrade, as a lot of new features and a lot of bugfixes have gone in since then.

Now, as best I can recall, I originally installed rabbitmq with apt-get, running in Ubuntu 10.04. To fix this, I got the newest .deb from the rabbitMQ site and installed it.  Here are the steps:

wget http://www.rabbitmq.com/releases/rabbitmq-server/v2.7.0/rabbitmq-server_2.7.0-1_all.deb
sudo apt-get install erlang-nox
sudo apt-get -f install
sudo apt-get install erlang-nox
sudo dpkg -i rabbitmq-server_2.7.0-1_all.deb

Very happy to be out of the woods on this one. I'm not a sysadmin and I don't aspire to be.