Books on writing distributed systems

[paddy@panici.net]

On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 08:03:38PM +0000, Simon Wistow wrote:
> Is there any decent literature on writing systems that keep data in sync 
> in a master-master/live fail over kind of way. I seem to have 3 projects 
> on that all have that requirements in that area. 
> 
> To be clear - I'm aware that there *is* literature out there on this 
> stuff, I'm just looking for a recommendation. At the moment I'm leaning 
> towards Tannenbaum's book because, well, he rocks.

More on the theory side than solving your specific problem, but I'd
recommend Distributed Algorithms by Nancy A Lynch as a good read.

> Additionally, are there any libraries out there that generically do this 
> sort of thing i.e have a binary blob of data that's kept in sync between 
> n>1 machines?

there are lots of systems that do stuff along these lines: clustered
filesystems, databases, imap servers, etc.  would drbd8 be any use to
you ?

Regards,
Paddy