In the network partition example, you say that in the smaller partition, changes cannot be commited because they cannot be replicated to the majority of nodes (as the smaller partition is... smaller). How is the partition to know this? The system can't tell the difference between a node leaving the network and a node undergoing a (tempoary) partition.
To give an example, say I have n machines in datacenter A, and n*.99 in datacenter B. datacenter A gets destroyed, permanently. Does datacenter B now reject all (EDIT: where reject = not commit) requests until a human comes along to tell it that datacenter A isn't coming back?
To give an example, say I have n machines in datacenter A, and n*.99 in datacenter B. datacenter A gets destroyed, permanently. Does datacenter B now reject all (EDIT: where reject = not commit) requests until a human comes along to tell it that datacenter A isn't coming back?