Comment 5 for bug 670289

Thomas, AFACT, there is no upstart job for rabbitmq-server, and the dependencies in /etc/init.d/* don't really apply to the system anymore w.r.t. filesystems, because mountall does all mounts before rc-sysinit 2 is called. Further, the dependency on remote_fs is something that would always come *after* local_fs, so that isn't an issue either.

You should have something in /var/log/boot.log, /var/log/rabbitmq/startup_log, or /var/log/rabbitmq/startup_err that indicates why it was not started. If its symlink is there as /etc/rc2.d/S20rabbitmq-server as it should be, then there's no real reason that I can think of for it not to start.

As for stopping, it should be one of the first things shutdown:

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 25 Dec 15 11:20 K20rabbitmq-server -> ../init.d/rabbitmq-server
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 353 Sep 7 2009 README
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 18 Nov 17 10:46 S20sendsigs -> ../init.d/sendsigs
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 17 Nov 17 10:46 S30urandom -> ../init.d/urandom
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 22 Nov 17 10:46 S31umountnfs.sh -> ../init.d/umountnfs.sh
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 20 Nov 17 10:46 S35networking -> ../init.d/networking
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 18 Nov 17 10:46 S40umountfs -> ../init.d/umountfs
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 20 Nov 17 10:46 S60umountroot -> ../init.d/umountroot
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 14 Nov 17 10:46 S90halt -> ../init.d/halt

Its possible that the stop method isn't effective, but the next thing, sendsigs, will be sending it kill -9, so it doesn't make sense why the machine wouldn't poweroff because of this.

If somebody who is experiencing this can do an alt-f7 or ctrl-alt-f7 to see the console, that might provide some insight into what is going on.