Federation Links Stuck in "Starting" Status After Policy Deletion

[4sudiptodas]

Describe the bug

Hi,

We created a policy that set up federation for each exchange with each federation upstream, which resulted in federation links being established for every exchange with each upstream.

After deleting the policy, the federation links are still appearing in the "starting" status.

We are running RabbitMQ 3.8.9 and Erlang 23.1.4. Could you please advise on how to clean up these stuck federation links?

Reproduction steps

1. rabbitmqctl set_policy federate-me '^federated.' '{"federation-upstream-set":"all"}'
2. Delete the policy from UI

...

Expected behavior

The federation links should have been deleted, but they remain in the "starting" state. Additionally, if an exchange name matches any upstream in RabbitMQ, it starts fetching messages.

Additional context

No response

[lukebakken]

RabbitMQ 3.8.x is long out of community support.

https://github.com/rabbitmq/rabbitmq-server/blob/main/COMMUNITY_SUPPORT.md

If you can reproduce this using the latest version of RabbitMQ, please follow-up here.

[michaelklishin]

Such links failed to connect and keep retrying. It can be a statistics tables leftover or a genuinely running link. I don't recall if that version has a way to list the links.

Disabling the plugin and re-enabling it will reap all federation links and in theory should remove all stats tables, so you won't see them in any case.