cassandra 2.0 catch 101 - part1 - correct cassandra Unsupported major.minor version 51.0

This is another series of my journey to cassandra 2.0, if you have not read the previous post, you should read here

As cassandra 2.0 required jdk 7.0 or later, if your system has jdk 6 running and configure, it is still possible to run cassandra 2.0 with jdk7, that is to make them co-exists. Download jdk and extract to the directory, e.g. /usr/lib/jvm. add JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/jdk1.7.0_04/ to /etc/default/cassandra. This should export the variable JAVA_HOME to your environment so that jdk 7 is used to start the cassandra successfully.

Because the above setting is set to work for cassandra instance only, for the admin tools that come with it, we will set another environment for it. This make sure we don't break our existing work. If you want the environment to work only for yourself, then you should create a file in your home directory. $HOME/.cassandra.in.sh . Below are the content.

JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/jdk1.7.0_04
. /usr/share/cassandra/cassandra.in.sh

This first line is the same as previously but the second line, we source the additional environment setting for the admin tools so that it can find the java classes. With that done, you should not get the error Unsupported major.minor version 51.0 below anymore!

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError: org/apache/cassandra/tools/NodeCmd : Unsupported major.minor version 51.0
	at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass1(Native Method)
	at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClassCond(ClassLoader.java:631)
	at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass(ClassLoader.java:615)
	at java.security.SecureClassLoader.defineClass(SecureClassLoader.java:141)
	at java.net.URLClassLoader.defineClass(URLClassLoader.java:283)
	at java.net.URLClassLoader.access$000(URLClassLoader.java:58)
	at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:197)
	at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
	at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:190)
	at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:306)
	at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Launcher.java:301)
	at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:247)
Could not find the main class: org.apache.cassandra.tools.NodeCmd.  Program will exit.