When running as root everything works fine, however when I run your commands a normal user, here is what happens..
> user01@server1:~$ > *sudo -iu cassandra* user01@server1:~$ > * cassandra -f -p /var/run/cassandra/cassandra.pid* *...* ERROR 16:46:09,355 Exception encountered during startup java.lang.AssertionError: Directory /var/lib/cassandra/data is not > accessible. .. java.io.FileNotFoundException: /var/log/cassandra/system.log (Permission > denied) ... ... Here are the folder permissions.. user01@server1:~$ ls /var/lib/cassandra -lh total 12K drwxr-xr-x 2 cassandra cassandra 4.0K Mar 10 16:43 commitlog drwxr-xr-x 4 cassandra cassandra 4.0K Mar 10 14:02 data drwxr-xr-x 2 cassandra cassandra 4.0K Mar 10 11:34 saved_caches
