Selected sections of this report will be published in the Proceedings of the 20th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, pp. 38-45, Taipe, Taiwan, April, 2000.
This paper describes the design of a light-weight group service able to operate in partitionable networks. Partitions pose challenges to the design of this service, in particular because inconsistent mapping decisions can be made when the system is partitioned. The paper focuses on the design of reconciliation mechanisms needed when a partition is healed. Also available extended report (gzip postscript), (pdf) .