This came out of a discussion with Brian: HASingletonElectionPolicy should only contain methods that actually called from the HASingletonSupport/HASingletonController classes so that they can inject attributes to the election policy that users don't have to specify in the ha singleton election policy bean definition.Therefore, /** | * Sets the preferred master node. As long as the preferred master node | * presents in the cluster, it will be always selected as master node, | * no matter what the election policy is. | * @param node String format of ip_address:port_number | */ | void setPreferredMaster(String node); | | String getPreferredMaster(); methods should not live in HASingletonElectionPolicy, but instead in HASingletonElectionPolicySimple. They could be defined by HASingletonElectionPolicySimpleMBean and implemented by HASingletonElectionPolicySimple, depending whether it makes sense to be accessible and potentially modified at runtime. Shall I reopen JBAS-4228 or create a new JIRA? If agreed, the change will happen for JBoss 5. What do we wanna do about 4.2? Leave it as it is? View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4121438#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...