On Sat, Jan 22, 2011 at 11:25 AM, Ted Dunning <[email protected]> wrote:
> Is it necessary to checkpoint ZK when checkpointing an hbase cluster?
>

I'd think that on restart Ted, it should be ok.  We clear zk state on
clean restart of cluster.
St.Ack


> On Sat, Jan 22, 2011 at 10:27 AM, Bill Graham <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> Last night while experimenting with getting lzo set up I managed to
>> somehow lose all .META. data and all my tables. My regions still exist
>> in HDFS, but the shell tells me I have no tables. At this point I'm
>> pretty sure I need to reinstall HBase clean-slate on HDFS, hence
>> losing all data, but I'm sharing my story in case there are JIRAs to
>> be created or lessons to be learned.
>>
>> Specifics:
>> - 4 Node cluster running 0.90.0.rc1
>> - 1 table of a few GBs and 24 regions, let's call it TableA
>> - CDH3b2
>>
>> 1. Just for kicks I decided to issue an alter table command to change
>> COMPRESSION to 'lzo' for TableA to see what would happen. I hadn't yet
>> taken any steps to install the native lzo libs in HBase (they exist in
>> HDFS), so this was probably a stupid thing to do. After issuing the
>> command I wasn't able to re-enable the table, nor could I fully
>> disable it. I was in a state somewhere in between the two, as
>> described in a thread earlier this week. The shell said enabled, the
>> master.jsp said disabled. Calls to do either would time out. The
>> master server was logging the same exceptions as in HBASE-3406 ad
>> infinitum. hbck -fix wasn't doing anything. After bouncing the entire
>> cluster a few times (master, RSs, zookeepers), I was able to finally
>> get back to normal state, with COMPRESSION set to 'none'  with hbck
>> -fix.
>>
>> Besides HBASE-3406, maybe there's another JIRA here where the shell
>> permits setting COMPRESSION => 'lzo' when lzo isn't set up and leaves
>> the table in a nasty state.
>>
>> At this point I should have been grateful and called in a night, but
>> noooooo... Instead I shut down the cluster again and symlinked
>> lib/native to the same dir in my hadoop home, which is lzo-enabled and
>> I restarted the cluster. All seemed ok.
>>
>> 2. At this point I decided to experiment with a new table after
>> reading http://wiki.apache.org/hadoop/UsingLzoCompression more
>> closely. After creating 'mytable' with lzo enabled, I saw similar
>> behavior as I did in 1. so I used the same techniques to just try to
>> just drop the table. After bouncing the cluster and issuing a hbck
>> -fix, the shell reported that HBase had no tables at all. It seemed
>> like all the .META. data was wiped out but I still had all of my
>> orphaned regions in HDFS. This was very bad.
>>
>> It was clear that these tables weren't coming back so in a last ditch
>> effort I stopped the HBase cluster, the SNN and the NN and I restored
>> HDFS from the checkpoint taken about an hour before. Now everything
>> was out of whack and HBase wouldn't even come up and -ROOT- couldn't
>> be located, .log/ files weren't being read properly and things were a
>> mess.
>>
>> One could make the argument that I was beating on HBase a bit and
>> maybe even trying to break things, but it didn't take a lot of effort
>> to get to a pretty dire state.
>>
>> thanks,
>> BIll
>>
>

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