On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 11:40 AM, Foss User <foss...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Today I formatted the namenode while the namenode and jobtracker was > up. I found that I was still able to browse the file system using the > command: bin/hadoop dfs -lsr / > > Then, I stopped the namenode and jobtracker and did a format again. I > started the namenode and jobtracker. I could still browse the file > system. Is this an expected behavior or a problem? > > I was formatting using the command: bin/hadoop namenode -format > > I was running this command on the namenode machine. > Were you running the format command as the same user that runs the namenode? With a default configuration, the dfs.name.dir has the user name included in it, so running that command as your user account won't affect the cluster if the cluster namenode is running as a "hadoop" account, for example. -Todd