diff --git a/CHANGES.txt b/CHANGES.txt
index 52b6dc2c359..415de1e6a5b 100644
--- a/CHANGES.txt
+++ b/CHANGES.txt
@@ -1026,6 +1026,9 @@ Release 0.20.0 - Tue Sep  8 12:53:05 PDT 2009
                (Mathias Herberts via Stack)
    HBASE-1804  Puts are permitted (and stored) when including an appended colon
    HBASE-1715  Compaction failure in ScanWildcardColumnTracker.checkColumn
+   HBASE-2352  Small values for hbase.client.retries.number and
+               ipc.client.connect.max.retries breaks long ops in hbase shell
+               (Alexey Kovyrin via Stack)
 
   IMPROVEMENTS
    HBASE-1089  Add count of regions on filesystem to master UI; add percentage
diff --git a/src/main/ruby/hbase/hbase.rb b/src/main/ruby/hbase/hbase.rb
index c4e740518a2..c2233accf32 100644
--- a/src/main/ruby/hbase/hbase.rb
+++ b/src/main/ruby/hbase/hbase.rb
@@ -36,7 +36,7 @@ module Hbase
       else
         self.configuration = org.apache.hadoop.hbase.HBaseConfiguration.create
         # Turn off retries in hbase and ipc.  Human doesn't want to wait on N retries.
-        configuration.setInt("hbase.client.retries.number", 1)
+        configuration.setInt("hbase.client.retries.number", 7)
         configuration.setInt("ipc.client.connect.max.retries", 3)
       end
     end