When I try to start cassandra on ubuntu 12.04 (installed via Datastax's dsc20 package) as a service as follows :
$ sudo service cassandra start
it says
*could not access pidfile for Cassandra
& no other messages or anything in logs.
But when I try to run as a root user( sudo cassandra -f) it just works properly & cassandra is started. While trying to debug I found that when trying to run as a non-root user I was getting these messages:
ERROR 17:48:08,432 Exception encountered during startup
java.lang.AssertionError: Directory /var/lib/cassandra/data is not accessible.
..
java.io.FileNotFoundException: /var/log/cassandra/system.log (Permission denied)
..
java.lang.AssertionError: Directory /var/lib/cassandra/data is not accessible.
Is there some problem with the packaging ? Not properly installed/ configured by package ??
By default the cassandra service does not and should not run as root.
My guess is you ran it in the foreground first, which automatically will create /var/lib/cassandra with root permissions instead of with the cassandra permissions. Either chown -R /var/lib/cassandra with the appropriate group and user or blow away the directory and try starting the service again.
$ su cassandra
then run
$ service cassandra start
It works for me.
来源：https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22308048/starting-cassandra-as-a-service-does-not-work-for-2-0-5-sudo-cassandra-f-works