Cassandra not getting started in CentOS 7 and RHEL 7

After a recent update in CentOS 7 and RHEL 7, the cassandra daemon stopped working. I was getting the following error while trying to start the cassandra using systemd. Similar installations were working fine in the recent past and suddenly it stopped working.

Mar 20 13:22:34 localhost systemd[1]: New main PID 72596 does not belong to service, and PID file is not owned by root. Refusing.
Mar 20 13:22:34 localhost systemd[1]: New main PID 72596 does not belong to service, and PID file is not owned by root. Refusing.
Mar 20 13:22:34 localhost systemd[1]: Failed to start LSB: distributed storage system for structured data.

Root Cause

Solution

Update the /etc/rc.d/init.d/cassandra file. Either make the following patch manually or replace the entire file with the file that I provided below.

Option: 1 – Manual Patch

Open /etc/rc.d/init.d/cassandra file and make the modifications as per comments in the below script. The below snippet is not the complete script, it is only the portion which needs update. Do not copy paste and replace the file completely with this

case "$1" in
start)
# Cassandra startup
echo -n "Starting Cassandra: "
[ -d `dirname "$pid_file"` ] || \
install -m 755 -o $CASSANDRA_OWNR -g $CASSANDRA_OWNR -d `dirname $pid_file`
# -Commented for fix
#su $CASSANDRA_OWNR -c "$CASSANDRA_PROG -p $pid_file" > $log_file 2>&1
# +Added for fix
runuser -u $CASSANDRA_OWNR -- $CASSANDRA_PROG -p $pid_file > $log_file 2>&1
retval=$?
# +Added new
chown root.root $pid_file
[ $retval -eq 0 ] && touch $lock_file
echo "OK"
;;
stop)
# Cassandra shutdown
echo -n "Shutdown Cassandra: "
# -Commented as per the fix
#su $CASSANDRA_OWNR -c "kill `cat $pid_file`"
# +Added for fixing the issue
runuser -u $CASSANDRA_OWNR -- kill `cat $pid_file`
retval=$?
[ $retval -eq 0 ] && rm -f $lock_file
for t in `seq 40`; do
status -p $pid_file cassandra > /dev/null 2>&1
retval=$?
if [ $retval -eq 3 ]; then
echo "OK"
exit 0
else
sleep 0.5
fi;
done

Option:2 – Replace the file

Replace the /etc/rc.d/init.d/cassandra file with the file present in the following link. This patch was made as per the JIRA issue CASSANDRA-15273.

Steps to replace the file are given below.

mv /etc/rc.d/init.d/cassandra /etc/rc.d/init.d/cassandra.old
curl -o /etc/rc.d/init.d/cassandra https://gist.githubusercontent.com/amalgjose/74cf98e0110c27b6124b0adbb698d372/raw/c08ce3481e9cb0601e79e127c78a65bf82080e5f/cassandra
systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl restart cassandra

 
The Gist code is pasted below.

This solution helped me. I hope this will help someone else also.