How should nodetool command be run as the user "nobody"? The nodetool command fails with an exception if it cannot create a .cassandra directory in the current user's home directory.
I'd like to schedule some nodetool commands to run with least privilege as cron jobs. I'd like to run them as the "nobody" user -- which typically has "/" as the home directory -- since that's what the user is typically used for (minimum privileges). None of the methods described in this JIRA actually seem to work (with 2.0.7 anyway) https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-6475 Testing as a normal user with no write permissions to the home directory (to simulate the nobody user) [vagrant@local-dev ~]$ nodetool version ReleaseVersion: 2.0.7 [vagrant@local-dev ~]$ rm -rf .cassandra/ [vagrant@local-dev ~]$ chmod a-w . [vagrant@local-dev ~]$ nodetool flush my_ks my_cf Exception in thread "main" FSWriteError in /home/vagrant/.cassandra at org.apache.cassandra.io.util.FileUtils.createDirectory(FileUtils.java:305) at org.apache.cassandra.utils.FBUtilities.getToolsOutputDirectory(FBUtilities.java:690) at org.apache.cassandra.tools.NodeCmd.printHistory(NodeCmd.java:1504) at org.apache.cassandra.tools.NodeCmd.main(NodeCmd.java:1204) Caused by: java.io.IOException: Failed to mkdirs /home/vagrant/.cassandra ... 4 more [vagrant@local-dev ~]$ HOME=/tmp nodetool flush my_ks my_cf Exception in thread "main" FSWriteError in /home/vagrant/.cassandra at org.apache.cassandra.io.util.FileUtils.createDirectory(FileUtils.java:305) at org.apache.cassandra.utils.FBUtilities.getToolsOutputDirectory(FBUtilities.java:690) at org.apache.cassandra.tools.NodeCmd.printHistory(NodeCmd.java:1504) at org.apache.cassandra.tools.NodeCmd.main(NodeCmd.java:1204) Caused by: java.io.IOException: Failed to mkdirs /home/vagrant/.cassandra ... 4 more [vagrant@local-dev ~]$ env HOME=/tmp nodetool flush my_ks my_cf Exception in thread "main" FSWriteError in /home/vagrant/.cassandra at org.apache.cassandra.io.util.FileUtils.createDirectory(FileUtils.java:305) at org.apache.cassandra.utils.FBUtilities.getToolsOutputDirectory(FBUtilities.java:690) at org.apache.cassandra.tools.NodeCmd.printHistory(NodeCmd.java:1504) at org.apache.cassandra.tools.NodeCmd.main(NodeCmd.java:1204) Caused by: java.io.IOException: Failed to mkdirs /home/vagrant/.cassandra ... 4 more [vagrant@local-dev ~]$ env user.home=/tmp nodetool flush my_ks my_cf Exception in thread "main" FSWriteError in /home/vagrant/.cassandra at org.apache.cassandra.io.util.FileUtils.createDirectory(FileUtils.java:305) at org.apache.cassandra.utils.FBUtilities.getToolsOutputDirectory(FBUtilities.java:690) at org.apache.cassandra.tools.NodeCmd.printHistory(NodeCmd.java:1504) at org.apache.cassandra.tools.NodeCmd.main(NodeCmd.java:1204) Caused by: java.io.IOException: Failed to mkdirs /home/vagrant/.cassandra ... 4 more [vagrant@local-dev ~]$ nodetool -Duser.home=/tmp flush my_ks my_cf Unrecognized option: -Duser.home=/tmp usage: java org.apache.cassandra.tools.NodeCmd --host <arg> <command> ...
