Installing CDH 4.7.1 with Cloudera Manager

I ran into several issues when trying to install CDH 4.7.1 using the latest Cloudera Manager. This post documents the steps required for success that are missing from Cloudera’s documentation.

Cloudera Manager 5.x runs on Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty, but CDH 4.7.1 doesn’t

The first problem I ran into is that Cloudera Manager 5.x runs on Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty Tahr), but you can’t install CDH 4.7.1 on Ubuntu 14.04, because there aren’t parcels for it. You can only install CDH 5.x on Trusty, so if you plan on installing CDH 4.x on your Cloudera Manager server, you’ll need to install Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) on your Cloudera Manager server instead.

Cloudera Manager server can’t resolve hostnames of cluster hosts

After running the cloudera-manager-installer.bin, you’ll have the opportunity to connect to Cloudera Manager and the express wizard will run. If you search for your hosts you’ll see that your hostnames are listed with the full FQDN. Because I didn’t have DNS set up, hostname.local showed up, but the server was unable to reach the server at hostname.local, the FQDN. I had to add the following entry to /etc/hosts where hostname is the name of my host, and 10.0.2.15 is the IP address of my host’s ethernet interface.

10.0.2.15     hostname.local     hostname

If your Cloudera Manager can’t resolve this correctly, you’ll get a failed installation with this text:

Installation failed. Failed to receive heartbeat from agent.
  Ensure that the host's hostname is configured properly.
  Ensure that port 7182 is accessible on the Cloudera Manager server 
    (check firewall rules).
  Ensure that ports 9000 and 9001 are free on the host being added.
  Check agent logs in /var/log/cloudera-scm-agent/ on the host being added 
    (some of the logs can be found in the installation details).

Cloudera Manager agent requires NTP

The Cloudera Manager agent that will be installed on each host will not start without an NTP daemon installed and running. The default desktop version of Ubuntu 12.04 did not have this installed by default. To install this, I ran the following command on the hosts:

sudo apt-get install ntp

If your Cloudera Manager agent doesn’t find NTP services running, it won’t start the agent service and you’ll get a failed installation with this text:

Installation failed. Failed to receive heartbeat from agent.
  Ensure that the host's hostname is configured properly.
  Ensure that port 7182 is accessible on the Cloudera Manager server 
    (check firewall rules).
  Ensure that ports 9000 and 9001 are free on the host being added.
  Check agent logs in /var/log/cloudera-scm-agent/ on the host being added 
    (some of the logs can be found in the installation details).