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I'm using hbase-0.90.0. I'm running it in standalone mode. While trying to execute any commands from "hbase shell" it is giving me the following error.

hbase(main):003:0> status 'detailed'


I'm new to HBase. Can you please help me out with this problem?

Thanks in advance

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3 Answers 3

For one reason or another your HBase Client is not talking to Zookeeper. I just had the same problem and the issue for me was that the hbase config (hbase-site.xml) had the wrong port for the zookeeper (The default is 2181 and someone had set it to 2182 incorrectly). The config for using zookeeper is at http://hbase.apache.org/book.html#zookeeper.

Also checking what hbase and zookeeper think their names are and what they actually are. A usual suspect is that the /etc/hosts file has some extra entries for localhost / So make sure your localhost has only one line for localhost and put all the aliases for on a single line in /etc/hosts

Sometimes having the ipv4 and ipv6 entries in localhost confuses things, so try commenting out all the ipv6 entries (the ones with colons ':' in the address.)

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thx ,It worked 4 me:)) –  zangeed Jan 5 '12 at 13:25

so i had the exact same problem and changing the /etc/hosts file did it for me. I changed it so that 'localhost' and my host name both pointed to ''

see http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.java.hadoop.hbase.user/19718 for more details.

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Woo hoo! This fixed the same problem for me. Well, my problem was almost the same: I was running Hbase Version 0.90.4, and the exact error message I got was "ERROR: org.apache.hadoop.hbase.ZooKeeperConnectionException: HBase is able to connect to ZooKeeper but the connection closes immediately. This could be a sign that the server has too many connections (30 is the default)." –  Jeff Dec 22 '11 at 5:54

I had the same issue when I first started up HBase standalone mode on my mac 10.9. I fixed several parameters, but not sure which one really works. Anyway, below is the place that I make changes:

  1. sudo nano /etc/hosts

    make sure only one localhost, and it is

  2. Edit hbase-site.xml

  3. Edit hbase-env.sh

    (Warning: this path is the Java 1.6 path, seems that Java 1.7 does not support HBase)
    export HBASE_OPTS="-Djava.security.krb5.realm= -Djava.security.krb5.kdc="
    (fix realm issue)

And now you shall be good! Good Luck!

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