ejabberd port: default config not working

[Matthew Pounsett]

I've just installed ejabberd from ports 

> sudo portversion -v ejabberd
ejabberd-2.1.11             =  up-to-date with port 

Just to get it running, I've put the sample configs in place as running configs.  I did a quick scan through them to look for any obvious changes that needed to be made for local configuration and started up the daemon. 

The only oddity I found is that ejabberdctl.cfg refers to /var/run/ejabberd/ejabberd.pid for the ejabberd PID file, but that directory wasn't created.  I tried creating it, but ejabberd writes nothing there.

> ps auxww | grep ejabberd
ejabberd  70497  0.0  0.1  8072  1236  ??  S     7:06PM   0:00.01 /usr/local/lib/erlang/erts-5.9.3.1/bin/epmd -daemon

> ls -la /var/run/ejabberd/
total 4
drwxr-xr-x   2 ejabberd  ejabberd   512 May 24 18:39 .
drwxr-xr-x  12 root      wheel     1024 May 27 19:09 ..
             
Despite this the daemon seems to have started fine.  However, the control client isn't able to talk to ejabberd.                                                   

> sudo ejabberdctl register matt conundrum.com [REDACTED]
Failed RPC connection to the node ejabberd at localhost: nodedown

Commands to start an ejabberd node:
  start  Start an ejabberd node in server mode
  debug  Attach an interactive Erlang shell to a running ejabberd node
  live   Start an ejabberd node in live (interactive) mode

Optional parameters when starting an ejabberd node:
  --config-dir dir   Config ejabberd:    /usr/local/etc/ejabberd
  --config file      Config ejabberd:    /usr/local/etc/ejabberd/ejabberd.cfg
  --ctl-config file  Config ejabberdctl: /usr/local/etc/ejabberd/ejabberdctl.cfg
  --logs dir         Directory for logs: /var/log/ejabberd
  --spool dir        Database spool dir: /var/spool/ejabberd
  --node nodename    ejabberd node name: ejabberd at localhost

Is this just the missing PID file that's the problem?  I can't find a reference to a PID config in the ejabberd.cfg file, so I'm not sure if it's really expected to write something in that location or not.  I'm also unsure how ejabberdctl is trying to communicate with ejabberd .. whether the PID file is even important..

Anyone know what I'm missing here?
Thanks