title: Cassandra NetworkTopologyStrategy replication
body: <p>I installed and started Cassandra on two linux machines in Amazon EC2. I also set cassandra.yaml to use a property file snitch and configured the cassandra-topology.properties file as the following:</p>
  
  <pre><code>  &lt;external IP 1&gt;=AWS1:R1
    &lt;external IP 2&gt;=AWS2:R1
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Then created a keyspace as the following:</p>
  
  <pre><code> create keyspace myks with strategy_options = [{AWS1:1,AWS2:1}]  and placement_strategy='NetworkTopologyStrategy'; 
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Then I created a column family and tried inserting one row...However, I'm getting a null back from the CLI when I try to insert. Did I miss something in the configuration? </p>
  
  <p>How can I find out what's going on?</p>
  
  <p>Also -- does Cassandra only read the cassandra-topology at startup? </p>
  
  <p>Thanks</p>