HBase fails to start [closed]

Question

I'm installing Hbase 0.94.2 as per the somewhat simplistic http://hbase.apache.org/book/quickstart.html, and it's not working yet. Running the start script i get in the log file:

2012-11-23 18:26:37,827 INFO org.apache.zookeeper.ClientCnxn: Session establishment complete on server localhost/127.0.0.1:2181, sessionid = 0x1
3b2e17842c0002, negotiated timeout = 40000
2012-11-23 18:26:37,866 INFO org.apache.hadoop.ipc.HBaseRPC: Server at localhost/127.0.0.1:39699 could not be reached after 1 tries, giving up.
2012-11-23 18:26:37,867 WARN org.apache.hadoop.hbase.master.AssignmentManager: Failed assignment of -ROOT-,,0.70236052 to localhost,39699,135368
7992912, trying to assign elsewhere instead; retry=0
org.apache.hadoop.hbase.client.RetriesExhaustedException: Failed setting up proxy interface org.apache.hadoop.hbase.ipc.HRegionInterface to loca
lhost/127.0.0.1:39699 after attempts=1
.
.
.
2012-11-23 18:26:37,869 WARN org.apache.hadoop.hbase.master.AssignmentManager: Unable to find a viable location to assign region -ROOT-,,0.70236
052
2012-11-23 18:29:53,157 ERROR org.apache.hadoop.hbase.master.HMasterCommandLine: Failed to start master

This is a an Ubuntu 12.04 LTS VirtualBox, 1GB Memory, 10GB free disk space, with Oracle JRE 1.6.0_37.

I found some workarounds talking about /etc/hosts but am not sure whether they are relevant. My etc/hosts contains only:

127.0.0.1   localhost
127.0.1.1   'my-host-name'

# The following lines are desirable for IPv6 capable hosts
::1     ip6-localhost ip6-loopback
fe00::0 ip6-localnet
ff00::0 ip6-mcastprefix
ff02::1 ip6-allnodes
ff02::2 ip6-allrouters

Any help or referral to a dedicated HBase forum would be much appreciated! Thanks!

Answer 1

Ok, this was simple, in /etc/hosts just changed 127.0.1.1 to 127.0.0.1, so now the local host name is resolved to the latter, not the former. And the forum for Hbase quick answers is http://apache-hbase.679495.n3.nabble.com/, where this was kindly answered. Not sure though why this change is necessary.