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I did a distributed scheme for something else that had two levels, a master and a group of slaves. Only the slaves talked to the master. For this effort I think a variation of the idea would be better. Have all of the brutes contact the master, who will, in the first transaction assign them to the next slave in a round-robin fashion.

Why not just have the brutes pick a slave at random? Of course, you need to give them a complete list of slaves to choose from. But then the only difference between the master and the slaves will be that the master doesn't get any keyspace (it's got it all to begin with) and doesn't report any results upward.

This is starting to sound like alt.sex.bondage.... Peter Trei Senior Software Engineer Purveyor Development Team Process Software Corporation http://www.process.com trei@process.com