Monday, May 28, 2012

Hadoop: "Format aborted" Error Message


I have recently started playing around with hadoop. I went through a bunch of tutorials and docs and installed it on a Centos 6 box. When I tried to start the namenode, it gave me an error informing that my namenode dir is not formatted. Fair enough but whenever I tried to format it, it used to get aborted. I checked all the configs, user, group, permissions and what not. I read and reread the docs to figure out if I am missing anything but no luck. Every time I got the following error:

-bash-4.1$ hadoop namenode -format
12/05/28 07:33:42 INFO namenode.NameNode: STARTUP_MSG:
/************************************************************
STARTUP_MSG: Starting NameNode
STARTUP_MSG:   host = hadoop1.staging.example.com/10.10.54.143
STARTUP_MSG:   args = [-format]
STARTUP_MSG:   version = 0.20.2-cdh3u4
STARTUP_MSG:   build = file:///data/1/tmp/topdir/BUILD/hadoop-0.20.2-cdh3u4 -r 214dd731e3bdb687cb55988d3f47dd9e248c5690; compil
ed by 'root' on Mon May  7 14:01:59 PDT 2012
************************************************************/
Re-format filesystem in /data/namenode ? (Y or N) y
Format aborted in /data/namenode
12/05/28 07:33:46 INFO namenode.NameNode: SHUTDOWN_MSG:
/************************************************************
SHUTDOWN_MSG: Shutting down NameNode at hadoop1.staging.example.com/10.10.54.143
************************************************************/


There were no logs or messages to analyze. Every things looked in order then what was the issue?

Turned out that when the CLI asked me "Re-format filesystem in /data/namenode ? (Y or N)" I was supposed to hit upper case Y and not y. I found this quite bad and un-intuitive on developers' part that they did not implement case-insensitivity or gave out a message about hitting upper case when a lower case was entered. I just hope that this post might save someone some time.

11 comments:

  1. Thank you for posting this. I had the exact same problem.

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  2. Oh God, I spent one day trying to figure this out... Thanks!

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  3. Had the same problem, thanks for the post!

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  4. thank you so much! i was going nuts. would've never figured that out.

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  5. You've got to be kidding me, why didn't the developers just add half a line of code? I also spent a few hours on this. Thanks for the fix!

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  6. Thanks mate, I facepalmed myself after reading this.

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  7. Thanks a lot! That was really helpful!

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  8. OMG... I am sitting with this issue since last night.. now saw your post... thanks soooooooo much :)

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  9. thanks a lot ..... jaw dropped at the sill'Y'ness ..........

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