I installed cassandra on a VM running Ubuntu Server 10.10.
cassandra login failure with org.apache.cassandra.auth.AllowAllAuthenticator but I always receive the following error message:
Login failure. Did you specify 'keyspace', 'username' and 'password'?
It turns out that when you specify an open port that doesn't immediately refuse your connection you will get this error. My cassandra instance was actually running on port 9160, not the 8080 that I was trying.