Starting cassandra as a service does not work for 2.0.5, sudo cassandra -f works

Question

When I try to start cassandra on ubuntu 12.04 (installed via Datastax\'s dsc20 package) as a service as follows :

$ sudo service cassandr

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

$ su cassandra

then run

$ service cassandra start

It works for me.