You might try a "take over" mode -- starting another copy gets to the point it looks to listen for UDP, the (if the listening fails), tells the other process to die over UDP, taking over then. This scheme would would reduce your "time-to-switch" to a much shorter window. Whenever given the shutdown signal, you could turn on the "watcher sleeping" light. The remaining issue, replacing hardware or OS (possibly due to failure) probably changes the UDP address. That might be trickier. I certainly feel happier when I can do a hand-off to another box, but it sounds like you might need the instruments to broadcast or multicast to get to that happy place.
--Scott David Daniels [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
