Determining the Last Membership of a Process Group After a Total Failure

摘要

We are interested in the problem of recovery after a total failure of a unit (adisaster); that is, recovery after all or large function normally. Disaster recovery requires that once sufficient members belong to the unit have restarted or got reconnected, the unit should resume functioning without further delay. A particular requirements is that only the components belonging to the last unit configuration be part of the post-disaster unit configuration. This paper presents an algorithm which a component can execute to determine whether it belonged to the last unit configuration. The algorithms has been developed in the context of an asynchronous distributed system where message delays are unknown and therefore a slow component can appear as crashed or disconnected.