here are some notes on getting your own ec2 hadoop single computer cluster upd, these are rough

Getting hadoop and hbase running in single server mode

I am going to track my progress and take some notes on how a newb to the linux world would go about setting up a hadoop node running hbase running on ec2. I have chosen ubuntu as my core OS as it offers all of the perks of linux, and is for me more useable than that of say redhat, suse, or mandrake; I have tried them all, and between the tools and the community, I feel that ubuntu is the best linux OS out there (I am so excited about Canonical’s decision to hire UI designers for linux, go-go gadget Ubuntu!).

2:16
I just got one of Eric Hammond Ubuntu images booted on Amazon. I used imaged ami-179e7a7e, which is a base install of Ubuntu LTS 8.04, and I used the firefox3 extension elasticfox to boot the ami.

I am not going to explain how to get an ami booted here, but there are other documents like these that can get you started with your first AMI boot.

2:28
Looking over the wiki.apache.org/hadoop website for setup guides, and there seems to be a few quick start ones and maybe a few that are just for ubuntu.

2:30
I am going to work off of the following tutorial and make changes along the way,…. I hope it works
http://wiki.apache.org/hadoop/Running_Hadoop_On_Ubuntu_Linux...(Single-Node_Cluster)

the tutorial targets java 1.5 and ubuntu 7.10, and hadoop .14.2 and is dated October 2007.
I am going to target
Ubuntu 8.10 LTS
Java 1.6
Hadoop .18

2:32
Apt-get install sun-java6-jdk

-this will take about 2-5min to download and install the sun JDK

2:55
After looking for a few text editors to replace vi or vim, I decided to just grab nano, jed, and gedit, as I remember one of those being more user friendly than vi

Apt-get install nano jed gedit

-2-5 min to install

3:07
Used “jed” to edit /etc/jvm for java6 by adding this line

/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun

to the top of the list

3:10
Was able to follow tutorials directions

3:20
Filed a minor bug for the image, it reports as 7.04 when using ssh.

3:23
Going to skip disabling ipv6, cause it requires a reboot and on ec2…. That is a pain in the ass, as I would need to set up and back up my image first.

3:51
Make sure you are back at the root login and do a wget to download the file at one of the hadoop mirrors, you will have to find one that has the 0.18 tar if you are following along.

the hadoop package was only 16MB so it downloaded really fast on my EC2 server, and I downloaded it to /tmp

4:00
After downloading I had to extract the files to a dir, since the tutorial extracted the tarbal to /usr/local/hadoop, I did the same from the /tmp dir, but first I had to make a directory

mkdir /usr/local/hadoop

tar xzvf hadoop-0.18.0.tar.gz -C /usr/local/hadoop

4:10
in that directory I saw a build.xml, so for good measure i decided to install ANT
apt-get install ant

4:11
Break

5:50
Break over and time to get more coffee. Meet a few people from geeksugar.

6:50
I found out I was working on the wrong server, and now I am back to where I left off, plus the hadoop user in the hadoop group now owns the hadoop dir as the turtorial suggests
7:02
Editing the conf/hadoop-env.sh file for java6 with JED

# The java implementation to use. Required.
# export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/j2sdk1.5-sun

Gets changed to

# The java implementation to use. Required.
export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun

7:15
Ok at this point in the tutorial, there are some major edits that need to be typed and I could not take it to not use cut and paste in a terminal window, so I decided to configure winSCP, so I could telnet in with a gui and a windows text editor.

I am also going to use the /mnt dir as my base for my datastore, as the one in the tutorial is on the root partition and is limited to 10gb on eric’s setup and mnt is set to grow.

In the future, it might make sense to set up an EBS (elastic block storage) for more persistent data access.

7:45
You have to run this command as the hadoop user if you are following this tutorial, or else the directory will have been owned by root

hadoop@ubuntu:~$ <HADOOP_INSTALL>/hadoop/bin/hadoop namenode -format

7:51
Make sure that all of the dirs in your hadoop install directory are writable by hadoop. It will try to write to the logs dir during starup.