Clearly I have no idea how to read stuff off the message queue.

several hours later, including a small amount of sleep

Okay got it.

There were lots of different problems:

• not understanding exchanges and topics (so data was sent, but not to the right places)
• not understanding the format of the packaged messages (thus data being dropped even though it was seen)
• differences between the format of the sample data and the format of test ipmitool data