Depending on how it was installed, try making sure that the cassandra user has an actual login shell defined in /etc/passwd and not something like /sbin/nologin or /bin/false.
From: user 01 <user...@gmail.com<mailto:user...@gmail.com>> Reply-To: "user@cassandra.apache.org<mailto:user@cassandra.apache.org>" <user@cassandra.apache.org<mailto:user@cassandra.apache.org>> Date: Monday, March 10, 2014 at 1:22 PM To: "user@cassandra.apache.org<mailto:user@cassandra.apache.org>" <user@cassandra.apache.org<mailto:user@cassandra.apache.org>> Subject: Re: Cassandra DSC 2.0.5 not starting - "* could not access pidfile for Cassandra" $ sudo su - cassandra I don't know why but this isn't actually working. It does not switch me to cassandra user[btw .. should this actually switch me to cassandra user?? ]. This user switching on my servers does not work for users like tomcat7 user, cassandra user but works for users that were manually created by user. Actually I tested this on two of my test servers but same results on both.
