Failure recovery apparatus and method for distributed processing shared resource control

Claim 1

A computer program product having a computer readable medium having computer program logic recorded thereon for causing a computer system to detect a master process failure in system having a plurality processes each controlled by a separate operating system and a plurality of shared resources each controlled by a master process and to notify all other processes of master process failure, the computer program product comprising: program product means for causing said computer system to detect failure of a master process for a shared resource; program product means for causing said computer system to request exclusive access to a shared resource control file using a network file management system procedure independent of said operating system for said processor; program product means for causing said computer system to establish exclusive access to said shared resource control file, if said request is granted; program product means for causing said computer system to determine from said control file the communications addresses of all other processes accessing said shared resource via the failed master process; program product means for causing said computer system to invalidate said control file; program product means for causing said computer system to send a message to each of said other processes indicating failure of said master process.