REDUNDANT MAINTENANCE ARCHITECTURE

A redundant maintenance architecture for general purpose, digital computer systems. The architecture has both redundant maintenance controllers and redundant maintenance interfaces. This invention provides uninterrupted maintenance control over a distributed system despite any single hardware failure. This is accomplished by providing a low level hardware fault detection and correction apparatus which does not require expensive test hardware or software. The low level hardware apparatus detects faults within a primary maintenance controller or interface and transfer control of the maintenance functions of the computer system to a secondary maintenance controller and interface. All of this is accomplished on-the-fly and does not require that the computer system be switched into a test mode or otherwise interrupted from normal operation.