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In unix a good parent, before they die, kills off all their children before they become zombies.

Yes, but if you want, a parent can disown it's childen and they'll be orphans, but still alive.

Many years ago, when I was relatively new to unix, I was taking a class on Ultrix (Digital's version of Unix at the time). We were talking about the way timekeeping amongst machines was managed. (prior to 'ntp' being developed).

Here's how it was described in the man page....

One server is designated a master. The master is authoritative for time. Slaves will query the master for the time on a periodic basis and thus keep themselves in sync. If the master dies, or is otherwise unavailable, the slaves will hold an election amongst themselves and elect a new master. This new master will continue as authoritative until the designated master returns. If the new master dies, a new election is held.

I always thought that was an interesting way of describing it. Seemed to work pretty well.

That was an advanced administrator class. We all had our own unix workstations we were working from, with the 'teacher' having the master. server. At the beginning of the class he let us know that he fully expected someone to be able to hack into the server eventually, but he'd appreciated it if we didn't destroy it until the end of the class. After the class, all servers were restored to a 'known good' state so it didn't really matter what we did during the class.