Resolved: Silly Issue with Hadoop Node Format

I started setting up hadoop cluster with 2 servers. And somehow couldn’t get past the ‘namenode format’ stage. That was strange considering I wasn’t a newbie. It consistently threw the following exception now matter what I did:

[XXX]$ bin/hadoop namenode -format
INFO namenode.NameNode: STARTUP_MSG:
/************************************************************
STARTUP_MSG: Starting NameNode
STARTUP_MSG: host = hadoop1/127.0.0.1
STARTUP_MSG: args = [-format]
STARTUP_MSG: version = 0.20.2
STARTUP_MSG: build = https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/hadoop/common/branches/branch-0.20 -r 911707; compiled by 'chrisdo' on Fri Feb 19 08:07:34 UTC 2010
************************************************************/
Re-format filesystem in /data/hadoop/name ? (Y or N) y
Format aborted in /data/hadoop/name
INFO namenode.NameNode: SHUTDOWN_MSG:
/************************************************************
SHUTDOWN_MSG: Shutting down NameNode at hadoop1/127.0.0.1
************************************************************/

And finally I resolved it. It turned of to be a silly case sensitivity issue. So “Y” was suppose to be uppercase…Damn!! 🙂

August 13th, 2010 in Java, Linux, Open Source

6 Comments

RazvanJune 4th, 2012 at 7:02 pm

thanks, helpful!
However it looks very bad on the hadoop developers!

farzaneJuly 12th, 2012 at 1:33 am

I had this Problem , but now You help me, thank you very very much

LookieJuly 31st, 2012 at 5:15 pm

yikes… it got me, too.
thanks a lot for posting this simple but very helpful message!!!

mukeshNovember 22nd, 2012 at 1:26 pm

thnks

PeterFebruary 24th, 2013 at 10:10 pm

Thank you a million times for posting this. I just had the same problem and was afraid I had made a major error in configuring Hadoop.

sumathiJune 29th, 2017 at 3:13 am

Thank you very much.

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