I have been trying to connect to a cassandra database on a Rackspace cloud server with no success.
Can anyone shed any light on the last paragraph of this comment from http://wiki.apache.org/cassandra/StorageConfiguration
listen_address Commenting out this property leaves it up to InetAddress.getLocalHost(). This will always do the Right Thing if the node is properly configured (hostname, name resolution, etc), and the Right Thing is to use the address associated with the hostname (it might not be: on cloud services you should ensure the private interface is used).