I recently announced the availability of censemble communication toolkit and a distributed lock manager built using it. After reading about ZEO and the plans to turn the Zope Storage Service into a replicated service, I thought you might find this work useful. regards, Mark Hayden CEnsemble Version 0.03 Download: ftp://24.142.58.202/pub/hayden/ CEnsemble is a toolkit for building reliable distributed applications. It provides a library of protocols that can be used for quickly building complex distributed applications. CEnsemble is a rewrite in C of the Ensemble system, which was written in a dialect of the ML programming language. More information of Ensemble can be found at: Homepage: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/Info/Projects/Ensemble/index.html Download: ftp://cs.cornell.edu/pub/ensemble/ Included with censemble-0.03 is a complete distributed lock manager (DLM) built using the toolkit. The DLM can be used either through a text-based pipe interface or linked into your application as a C library. No familiarity with Ensemble is needed to use the DLM (all the interface is in one header file). A DLM tutorial is included (censemble/dlm/README). The DLM features include: * Fault-tolerant. Any of the lock manager processes can fail; the system will remain available as long as a quorum (majority) of the servers continue running. * Load balanced: locks are randomly assigned to servers to manage. As servers are added or removed from the system, they will reassign locks to even the load. * Reader/writer locks.