Replacing a node

More often than not, you find yourself in a less than situation where you do not really want to remove a dead node; instead, you want to replace it. The reasons can be many, your cloud service provider finds that a node is sitting on degraded hardware and kills the nodes with a notification mail to you.

All versions after Cassandra Version 1.2 have simplified replacing a node to merely running one command. Here are the steps to replace a node:

1. Install Cassandra on the new node. Make sure conf/cassandra.yaml has all the custom changes that exist in other nodes. (The best way to do this is to copy cassandra.yaml from a live node, and change the node-specific setting.)

2. Make sure you have got the following variables right: cluster_name, endpoint_snitch, listen_address, broadcast_address, and seeds.

3. Make sure the data directories are clean. If you are reusing a node that used to be a part of Cassandra cluster, it can possibly lead to a startup failure if the data directory has old...