Low Description
Start Cassandra with -Dcassandra.fd_initial_value_ms=1000 and you'll get the following stacktrace:
INFO [main] 2014-02-21 14:45:57,731 StorageService.java (line 617) Starting up server gossip
ERROR [main] 2014-02-21 14:45:57,736 CassandraDaemon.java (line 464) Exception encountered during startup
java.lang.ExceptionInInitializerError
at org.apache.cassandra.gms.Gossiper.<init>(Gossiper.java:178)
at org.apache.cassandra.gms.Gossiper.<clinit>(Gossiper.java:71)
at org.apache.cassandra.service.StorageService.joinTokenRing(StorageService.java:618)
at org.apache.cassandra.service.StorageService.initServer(StorageService.java:583)
at org.apache.cassandra.service.StorageService.initServer(StorageService.java:480)
at org.apache.cassandra.service.CassandraDaemon.setup(CassandraDaemon.java:348)
at org.apache.cassandra.service.CassandraDaemon.activate(CassandraDaemon.java:447)
at org.apache.cassandra.service.CassandraDaemon.main(CassandraDaemon.java:490)
Caused by: java.lang.NullPointerException
at org.apache.cassandra.gms.FailureDetector.getInitialValue(FailureDetector.java:81)
at org.apache.cassandra.gms.FailureDetector.<clinit>(FailureDetector.java:48)
... 8 more
ERROR [StorageServiceShutdownHook] 2014-02-21 14:45:57,754 CassandraDaemon.java (line 191) Exception in thread Thread[StorageServiceShutdownHook,5,main]
java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: Could not initialize class org.apache.cassandra.gms.Gossiper
at org.apache.cassandra.service.StorageService$1.runMayThrow(StorageService.java:550)
at org.apache.cassandra.utils.WrappedRunnable.run(WrappedRunnable.java:28)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:724)
Glancing at the code, this is because the FailureDetector logger isn't initialized when the static initialization of INITIAL_VALUE happens.