I've got JBAS-5161 ready to be committed. There's a small change though that I wanted to pass through the forum before committing it: Instead of parsing host:port manually by searching for colon and then calling substring, I thought it'll be easier and less cumbersome to parse it via an URI. To do this, I create a new URI from "cluster://" + preferredMaster, i.e. /** | * Create a URI instance from the given preferred master. | * | * @param str contains the String format of the preferred master. | * @return an instance of URI, or null if the str cannot be parsed. | */ | protected URI createUri(String str) | { | try | { | return new URI("cluster://" + preferredMaster); | } | catch (URISyntaxException use) | { | log.debug("Cannot extract URI from " + preferredMaster, use); | } | | return null; | } and then call getHost() and getPort() on the URI instance to get the host/ip and port values. Even though a new URI is inmutable, I haven't cached it cos preferred master can be changed at runtime. URI is just an identifier in comparison to URL, so I don't expect creation of URI instances to be costly. To make sure I didn't introduce any bugs with this, I've also created PreferredMasterElectionPolicyUnitTestCase that contains several standalone tests that probe different inputs for preferred master. Brian, I'll send you a patch before committing in case you wanna have a look to it. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4128202#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...