OperationTimedOut during cqlsh alter table - cassandra

Question

I am receiving a OperationTimedOut error while running an alter table command in cqlsh. How is that possible? Since this is just a table metadata update, shouldn't this operation run almost instantaneously?
Specifically, this is an excerpt from my cqlsh session
cqlsh:metric> alter table metric with gc_grace_seconds = 86400;
OperationTimedOut: errors={}, last_host=sandbox73vm230
The metric table currently has a gc_grace_seconds of 864000. I am seeing this behavior in a 2-node cluster and in a 6-node 2-datacenter cluster. My nodes seem to be communicating fine in general (e.g. I can insert in one and read from the other). Here is the full table definition (a cyanite 0.1.3 schema with DateTieredCompactionStrategy, clustering and caching changes):
CREATE TABLE metric.metric (
tenant text,
period int,
rollup int,
path text,
time bigint,
data list<double>,
PRIMARY KEY ((tenant, period, rollup, path), time)
) WITH CLUSTERING ORDER BY (time ASC)
AND bloom_filter_fp_chance = 0.01
AND caching = '{"keys":"ALL", "rows_per_partition":"NONE"}'
AND comment = ''
AND compaction = {'timestamp_resolution': 'SECONDS', 'class': 'org.apache.cassandra.db.compaction.DateTieredCompactionStrategy'}
AND compression = {'sstable_compression': 'org.apache.cassandra.io.compress.LZ4Compressor'}
AND dclocal_read_repair_chance = 0.0
AND default_time_to_live = 0
AND gc_grace_seconds = 864000
AND max_index_interval = 2048
AND memtable_flush_period_in_ms = 0
AND min_index_interval = 128
AND read_repair_chance = 0.0
AND speculative_retry = 'NONE';

Answer 1

I realize at this point the question is pretty old, and you may have either figured out the answer or otherwise moved on, but wanted to post this in case others stumbled upon it.
The default cqlsh request timeout is 10 seconds. You can adjust this by starting up cqlsh with the --request-timeout option set to some value that allows your ALTER TABLE to run to completion, e.g.:
cqlsh --request-timeout=1000000