I was facing failed to replace bad datanode error while appending new data to file and the work around was to set dfs.replication to less than 3 , so I set it to 1 just to test it. But I still got the same error. I looked at the hadoop web interface and surprisingly the replication factor was still 3 . but when I did hdfs dfs -setrep 1 <file_name> the replication is set to 1 and I could append to file. Why is this happening? Can I not set default replication factor ? I tried formating namenode still no change.

Here's my hdfs-site.xml

<configuration>
<property>
  <name>dfs.replication</name>
  <value>1</value>
</property>

<property>
  <name>dfs.permissions</name>
  <value>false</value>
</property>

  <property> 
    <name>dfs.support.append</name>
    <value>true</value> 
</property>
</configuration>

I tried to follow steps from this question, still my replication factor is 3. I am running hadoop in single node cluster.