We propose a distributed dictionary that allows insert and search operations and that tolerates arbitrary single server crashes. The distinctive feature of our model is that the crash of a server cannot be detected. This is in contrast to all other proposals of distributed fault-tolerant search structures presented thus far. It reflects the real situation in the internet more accurately, and is in general more suitable to complex overall conditions. This makes our solution fundamentally

more »

... t from all previous ones, but also more complicated. We present in detail the algorithms for searching, insertion, and graceful recovery of crashed servers. * A preliminary version of this report appeared as [14] . We gratefully acknowledge the support of the project "Highly available scalable data structures (2100-066768)" by the Swiss National Science Foundation SNF.