Start-dfs sh daemons not starting localhost mkdir cannot create directory user Permission denied

Question

I am not able to start the daemons using start-dfs.sh command. I am getting the following error:

start-dfs.sh
Starting namenodes on [localhost]
hduser@localhost's password: 
localhost: mkdir: cannot create directory `/user': Permission denied
localhost: chown: cannot access `/user/user': No such file or directory
localhost: starting namenode, logging to /user/user/hadoop-user-namenode-canberra.out
localhost: /home/user/work/software/cloudera/hadoop-2.0.0-cdh4.0.0/sbin/hadoop-daemon.sh: line 150: /user/user/hadoop-hduser-namenode-canberra.out: No such file or directory
localhost: head: cannot open `/user/user/hadoop-hduser-namenode-canberra.out' for reading: No such file or directory

Answer 1

Make the following changes to the hadoop-env.sh file:

export HADOOP_LOG_DIR=/path/to/hadoop/extract/logs/

Now run start-dfs.sh command, it should work fine.

If you are using packages instead, don't use these scripts and instead just do:

service hadoop-hdfs-namenode start
service hadoop-hdfs-datanode start
service hadoop-hdfs-secondarynamenode start