Very short post – my HiveServer2 process was running without errors after deployment, but it wasn’t really running.

Connecting via JDBC yielded errors saying the connection was being refused.  Analyzing the server showed that the port was not open using:

sudo netstat -nlp | grep 10000

I enabled debug logs with the extra command line parameter:

--hiveconf hive.root.logger=DEBUG,console

And it still didn’t show much, except something about creating the scratch directories (but not an error).

After a while, I figured out that the scratch directories were set to be created at the root of the file system in a new directory which didn’t exist yet. The user running hive did not have these permissions.

So, I created the scratch directory and gave ownership to the hive user, and then everything came up and worked great on the next hiveserver2 service restart.