CassandraDB Help is needed

Hello, We're having a problem with our Cassandra database node ring. Right now we're in development mode for a website that will use this NoSQL database as it's backend data store. Since we're in development mode currently, we only have one web node that runs Cassandra. But every once in a while we might test the concept by increasing the number of nodes in the ring. This happened recently when a developer increased the nodes in the ring, but forgot to decommission the node before deleting the instance. As a result we now have a dead cassandra node in the ring that we can't get rid of. I've tried removing the instance myself a few different ways and writing the cassandra mailing list for help. But so far I've had no luck. And this is a problem because we can't perform database cleanup actions on the ring with the dead node still there. So that's where we need help. The only thing you would need to do is remove this dead cassandra node from the ring. Such that you can issue this command: [root@beta-new:~] #nodetool status Datacenter: datacenter1 ======================= Status=Up/Down |/ State=Normal/Leaving/Joining/Moving -- Address Load Tokens Owns Host ID Rack UN [login to view URL] 212.74 KB 256 49.4% fd2f76ae-8dcf-4e93-a37f-bf1e9088696e rack1 DN [login to view URL] ? 256 50.6% f2a48fc7-a362-43f5-9061-4bb3739fdeaf rack1 And see that the dead node is no longer listed. Of course the existing cassandra database also needs to remain intact and the website that uses it needs to function as it did before.