Method for operating a computer cluster

The invention allows for dealing with failures that may result in split-brain situations. In particular the safe management of shared resources is supported even though the owners of a shared resource may be subject to split-brain situation. In addition our invention allows us to update the cluster configuration despite the fact that some members of the cluster cannot be reached during the reconfiguration. The policies imposed by our invention ensure that all nodes started always use the up-to-date configuration as working configuration or if that is not possible the administrator is warned about a potential inconsistency of the configuration.