Exception when starting Hive in Ambari in HDP 2.6

Question

Error message: Caught an exception while executing custom service command: <type 'exceptions.OSError'>: [Errno 13] Permission denied: '/var/lib/ambari-agent/cred/conf/hive/hive-site.jceks'; [Errno 13] Permission denied: '/var/lib/ambari-agent/cred/conf/hive/hive-site.jceks'

The file exists and setting it to 777 does not solve the problem.

The service that fails to start is "MySQL Server". I can start and restart the msqld on the commandline.

Answer 1

Stumbled upon the exact same issue during a fresh Hive Install on Ambari
I circumvented it by dropping the jceks security

I edited the hive-site.xml file
/etc/hive/2.x.x.x-xxx/0/conf.server/hive-site.xml

Removed :

  <property>
      <name>hadoop.security.credential.provider.path</name>
      <value>jceks://file/usr/lib/hive/conf/hive.jceks</value>
  </property>

Added :

<property>
  <name>javax.jdo.option.ConnectionPassword</name>
  <value>password</value>
  <description>password to use against metastore database</description>
</property>

And voilà.

Answer 2

This could also be because the ambari-agent in the concerned node is not run as a superuser. Go to the node where the problem exists and do:

ps aux | grep ambari-agent

If it is run by a non supersuer, do:

ambari-agent stop

Then run:

sudo ambari-agent start