After some continued teething problems with setting up the pseudo cluster and getting everything to work together, I finally have a working pseudo cluster :) I performed the same map-reduce example as a single node setup with success. I also recorded a video of a bulk of the required work being done (4min, will only play in Linux video player as far as I know)
From here, I need to look at the other examples packaged with Hadoop, and then look to write my own program in order to analyse the server log files that the system will be used on.
