Error when connecting to local HBase

Finally we found the problem and solved it. It turned out to be a dependencies problem. We were using hbase-0.95.0 and hbase-client-0.95.0. Using hbase-0.94.7 or hbase-0.94.9 seemed to work.

Yet, some problems occurred under certain circumstances even with that versions of the HBase library. Particularly, some problems arised when running it within an application server (JBoss AS7). In the end, all problems seems to be solved by removing the dependency hbase-client-0.95.0, and replacing it by haboop-core-1.1.2 as some classes not contained in the hbase libraries were required.

Regards.

I'd recommend first check your HBase Master / RegionServer ports are really bound with netstat -n -a. I had situation when HBase Master IPC was bound to only external IP (this was Cloudera CDH) and it was not reachable through 127.0.0.1. It looks like most probable case for you - hbase shell should still work in this case.

Another possible reason could be previous cluster crash with some HDFS data corrupted. In this case HBase does not actually start waiting for HDFS to exit safe mode. But this looks like not your case. If it is, you can manually force HDFS to exit safe mode from console and then do fsck for Hadoop and similar procedure for HBase.