On Mon, Sep 05, 2011 at 08:07:55AM -0400, Paul Davis wrote: Read: the remote jackd needs to be informed and then trigger a session-save on its side. Seems doable. A typical case for out-of-band communication (given that netjack has such an OOB channel). I once was an OpenMPI programmer, and launching processes on a remote host is crucial to MPI environments. They have a complex I/O forwarding system, combined with something called process launching system. Several "plugins" provided different methods of launching processes, think of ssh or a cluster scheduler like Sun Gridengine. While I think that implementing all this would be way too complicated, one could come up with a simple extension to the net backend: We could agree that, for transparent restore on networks, it must be possible to ssh to the remote host. In fact, launching jackd there could also be coupled to this idea. Then, the remote net backend takes a single argument for the session to be loaded, and that's it. State remains local to the remote machine. Actively launching the remote jackds might also simplify the entire invocation process. Just name a few hosts on the command line and off you go. Like this: jackd -d future-net -hosts box1,box2,box3 This would spawn remote jackds on box1, box2 and box3 and then wait for the user to start clients. Which, by the way, could also be done remotely. Note that the entire idea is completely orthogonal to jackd, so one could come up with a tool that uses ssh to launch stuff on different nodes and triggers the session-save/session-restores on all nodes. Ladish jumps to my mind: "launch remote jackd" and "launch remote jack client". Ok, it's sort of "sessions over sessions", but recursive concepts have always been around. ;) Just my €0.02