If you are manually booting an Apache Cassandra server and you get the following message:

Fatal configuration error; unable to start server. See log for stacktrace.
 INFO 21:29:27,638 Announcing shutdown
ERROR 21:29:27,639 Exception in thread Thread[StorageServiceShutdownHook,5,main]
java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Invalid token for Murmur3Partitioner. Got true but expected a long value (unsigned 8 bytes integer).
 at org.apache.cassandra.dht.Murmur3Partitioner$1.fromString(Murmur3Partitioner.java:190)
 at org.apache.cassandra.service.StorageService.getTokensFor(StorageService.java:1456)
 at org.apache.cassandra.service.StorageService.handleStateNormal(StorageService.java:1518)
 at org.apache.cassandra.service.StorageService.onChange(StorageService.java:1355)
 at org.apache.cassandra.gms.Gossiper.doOnChangeNotifications(Gossiper.java:1145)
 at org.apache.cassandra.gms.Gossiper.addLocalApplicationState(Gossiper.java:1374)
 at org.apache.cassandra.gms.Gossiper.stop(Gossiper.java:1400)
 at org.apache.cassandra.service.StorageService$1.runMayThrow(StorageService.java:584)
 at org.apache.cassandra.utils.WrappedRunnable.run(WrappedRunnable.java:28)
 at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:724)

No need to panic. Chances are the server is still running, it’s just a case of killing the process running it and starting the server up again.

Sounds daft but it saves Googling around trying to find the answer….