Dealing with an unassigned hbase:namespace

[Josh Elser]

I have a cluster on branch-2.0 from a week or two ago where 
hbase:namespace is not assigned (haven't figured out why yet), I can't 
use any of the normal assign/move shell commands because the Master is 
useless as it's not initialized (because hbase:namespace is 
unreachable), but I can't figure out how I can get the Master to realize 
it needs to assign it.

Do we have this written down somewhere already?
Thanks in advance.

- Josh