Flume collector not recovering properly if the hdfs namenode goes down.

Via Eric van Dewoestine
"""
I'm just getting started with flume and attempting to test the fault
tolerance of the system. We are initially logging to flat files, but
would like to move to logging straight into hdfs. What I'm attempting
to test is the case where:

1. a flume collector receives a message to be logged to hdfs
2. flume cannot connect to hdfs, long enough to exhaust the 10
attempts by the hadoop ipc.Client resulting in a
ConnectionException being logged.
3. bring hdfs up

After bringing hdfs up I'd like to see flume auto connect at some
point so that messages can then be written there, but it appears that
once that ConnectionException is raised, the only way to get flume to
connect to hdfs is a restart.

"""