Fully removing a decommissioned Cassandra node

Question

Running Cassandra 1.0, I am shrinking a ring from 5 nodes down to 4. In order to do that I ran nodetool decommission on the node I want to remove, then stopped

Answer 1

With Cassandra 2.0, you need to use sh nodetool decommission on node to be removed. In your case, check if you have removed entries in cassandra-topology.properties

Answer 2

I was able to remove the decommissioned node using nodetool removetoken, but I had to use the force option.

Here's the output of my commands:

iowalker:~$ nodetool -h `hostname` removetoken 57981914123659253974350789668785134662

<waited 5 hours, the node was still there>

iowalker:~$ nodetool -h `hostname` removetoken status
RemovalStatus: Removing token (57981914123659253974350789668785134662). Waiting for replication confirmation from [/xx.xxx.xxx.xx,/xx.x.xxx.xx,/xx.xx.xx.xxx].
iowalker:~$ nodetool -h `hostname` removetoken force
RemovalStatus: Removing token (57981914123659253974350789668785134662). Waiting for replication confirmation from [/xx.xxx.xxx.xx,/xx.x.xxx.xx,/xx.xx.xx.xxx].
iowalker:~$ nodetool -h `hostname` removetoken status
RemovalStatus: No token removals in process.