[HBASE-2806] DNS hiccups cause uncaught NPE in HServerAddress#getBindAddress

• Type: Bug
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Minor
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 0.90.0
• Hadoop Flags: Reviewed
• Assignee: Benoit Sigoure
• Reporter: Benoit Sigoure
• Created: 30/Jun/10 18:40
• Updated: 20/Nov/15 12:43
• Resolved: 05/Jul/10 19:35

Description

Yesterday at the Hadoop Summit, the "HADOOP" wireless network was using a pair of DNS servers that couldn't resolve localhost.. This prevented me from starting HBase as the construction of the HMaster was failing with the following rather cryptic error:

2010-06-29 14:30:24,603 ERROR org.apache.hadoop.hbase.master.HMaster: Failed to start master
java.lang.RuntimeException: Failed construction of Master: class org.apache.hadoop.hbase.master.HMaster$LocalHMasternull
        at org.apache.hadoop.hbase.master.HMaster.constructMaster(HMaster.java:1217)
        at org.apache.hadoop.hbase.LocalHBaseCluster.<init>(LocalHBaseCluster.java:112)
        at org.apache.hadoop.hbase.master.HMaster.doMain(HMaster.java:1298)
        at org.apache.hadoop.hbase.master.HMaster.main(HMaster.java:1355)
Caused by: java.lang.reflect.InvocationTargetException
        at sun.reflect.NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance0(Native Method)
        at sun.reflect.NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance(NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.java:39)
        at sun.reflect.DelegatingConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance(DelegatingConstructorAccessorImpl.java:27)
        at java.lang.reflect.Constructor.newInstance(Constructor.java:513)
        at org.apache.hadoop.hbase.master.HMaster.constructMaster(HMaster.java:1215)
        ... 3 more
Caused by: java.lang.NullPointerException
        at org.apache.hadoop.hbase.HServerAddress.getBindAddress(HServerAddress.java:89)
        at org.apache.hadoop.hbase.master.HMaster.<init>(HMaster.java:204)
        at org.apache.hadoop.hbase.master.HMaster$LocalHMaster.<init>(HMaster.java:1230)
        ... 8 more

The NullPointerException in getBindAddress comes from the following line of code:

    return this.address.getAddress().getHostAddress();

where getAddress() was returning null.

I think the code should check for this case, log an appropriate error message (to point whoever is going to troubleshoot the problem in the right direction), and throw something else than an NPE.