Installing Cassandra on MINIX NEO X5 min (android multimedia player)

Intro

I started doing some DIY home automation projects. Although I have the mega popular Raspberry Pi available I decided to use the MINIX NEO X5 mini because I felt this device could be used a lot better if it served me as some sort of home automation server. The first part in this story is getting a more server oriented OS on the device. I decided to go with the linux. After a lot of searching and trial and error I decided to deploy an application called Linux deploy and described it in my previous blog post. Trough the rest of the tutorial I'll assume you managed to install a linux instance on your MINIX. I am going to gather a lot of telemetry data with the solution I am building so installing Cassandra seems as a natural choice to me. There will be a lot of writes and Cassandra is good at writing at an incredible scale.

Installing Java

        $ echo "deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/webupd8team/java/ubuntu trusty main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/webupd8team-java.list
        $ echo "deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/webupd8team/java/ubuntu trusty main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/webupd8team-java.list
        $ sudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 --recv-keys EEA14886
        $ sudo apt-get update
        $ sudo apt-get install oracle-java8-installer
        # you'll need to accept license agreement

        # set environment variables
        $ sudo apt-get install oracle-java8-set-default

        # login once again just in case
        $ exit
    

Installing python

Cassandra comes with a very nice tool called cqlsh. The version of linux we currently have installed will not run it without a python available on the system. So we have to install it first.

        $ sudo apt-get install python2.7
    

Let's start the Cassandra

Configuring the Cassandra is a chapter on it's own. We'll make minimal adjustments before starting. We'll configure the Cassandra to respond to queries from other hosts and while we are at it we'll enable the virtual nodes. (Will be easier to scale later).

        $ cd CASSANDRA_INSTALL_DIRECTORY
        $ nano conf/cassandra.yaml

        # uncomment
        num_tokens: 256

        # change to 0.0.0.0
        # this will enable you to contact the cassandra
        # from other computers etc.
        rpc_address: 0.0.0.0

        #save file

        $ cd ..
        $ ./bin/cassandra

        # after seeing something like
        # Startup completed! Now serving reads.
        # press ^C (don't be afraid cassandra still runs)

        $ bin/cqlsh

        Connected to Test Cluster at localhost:9160.
        [cqlsh 3.1.8 | Cassandra 1.2.18 | CQL spec 3.0.5 | 
        Thrift protocol 19.36.2]
        Use HELP for help.
        cqlsh>
    

Shutting cassandra down:

        # find PID of a cassandra process

        $ ps -ef | grep cassandra

        # run kill -9 [the PID number ... i.e. 8212]
    

Running Cassandra on android multimedia player is fun :)