Just a heads up that I committed Eric Evans's patch from #20, which replaces bin/start-server with bin/cassandra and bestows it with magical shell kung-fu to background the server cleanly by default. Should work out of the box on linux, OS X, and cygwin.
Use the -f flag to put it in foreground mode (the way it used to be) and -p <pidfile> to log the process id to a file where it can be used for shutdown. -Jonathan
