Cassandra Reaper 1.4 was just released with security features that now expand to the whole REST API.

Security Improvements

Reaper 1.2.0 integrated Apache Shiro to provide authentication capabilities in the UI. The REST API remained fully opened though, which was a security concern. With Reaper 1.4.0, the REST API is now fully secured and managed by the very same Shiro configuration as the Web UI. Json Web Tokens (JWT) were introduced to avoid sending credentials over the wire too often. In addition spreaper , Reaper’s command line tool, has been updated to provide a login operation and manipulate JWTs.

The documentation was updated with all the necessary information to handle authentication in Reaper and even some samples on how to connect LDAP directories through Shiro.

Note that Reaper doesn’t support authorization features and it is impossible to create users with different rights.

Authentication is now enabled by default for all new installs of Reaper.

Configurable JMX port per cluster

One of the annoying things with Reaper was that it was impossible to use a different port for JMX communications than the default one, 7199.

You could define specific ports per IP, but that was really for testing purposes with CCM.

That long overdue feature has now landed in 1.4.0 and a custom JMX can be passed when declaring a cluster in Reaper:

TWCS/DTCS tables blacklisting

In general, it is best to avoid repairing DTCS tables, as it can generate lots of small SSTables that could stay out of the compaction window and generate performance problems. We tend to recommend not to repair TWCS tables either, to avoid replicating timestamp overlaps betwen nodes that can delay the deletion of fully expired SSTables.

When using the auto-scheduler though, it is impossible to specify blacklists, as all keyspaces and all tables get automatically scheduled by Reaper.

Based on the initial PR of Dennis Kline that was then re-worked by our very own Mick, a new configuration setting allows automatically blacklisting of TWCS and DTCS tables for all repairs:

blacklistTwcsTables: false

When set to true , Reaper will discover the compaction strategy for all tables in the keyspace and remove any table with either DTCS or TWCS, unless they are explicitely passed in the list of tables to repair.

Web UI improvements

The Web UI reported decommissioned nodes that still appeared in the Gossip state of the cluster, with a Left state. This has been fixed and such nodes are not displayed anymore.

Another bug was the number of tokens reported in the node detail panel, which was nowhere near matching reality. We now display the correct number of tokens and clicking on this number will open a popup containing the list of tokens the node is responsible for:

Work in progress

Work in progress will introduce the Sidecar Mode, which will collocate a Reaper instance with each Cassandra node and support clusters where JMX access is restricted to localhost.

This mode is being actively worked on currently and the branch already has working repairs.

We’re now refactoring the code and porting other features to this mode like snapshots and metric collection.

This mode will also allow for adding new features and permit Reaper to better scale with the clusters it manages.

Upgrade to Reaper 1.4.0

The upgrade to 1.4 is recommended for all Reaper users. The binaries are available from yum, apt-get, Maven Central, Docker Hub, and are also downloadable as tarball packages. Remember to backup your database before starting the upgrade.

All instructions to download, install, configure, and use Reaper 1.4 are available on the Reaper website.