More important than that paper are the rest of the papers by Leslie Lamport.<p>Specifically the paper entitled Time, Clocks and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System. [1]<p>This is basically the seminal paper on distributed systems and should be required reading for anyone considering playing with distributed locking mechanisms.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;research.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;um&#x2F;people&#x2F;lamport&#x2F;pubs&#x2F;time-clocks.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;research.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;um&#x2F;people&#x2F;lamport&#x2F;pubs&#x2F;t...</a>