In a very similar manner to the way we previously used a thin client to connect to the cluster rather than automatically discovering it, we can nominate a number of nodes that can be used to discover the presence of the wider cluster. This is akin to registering a node's presence with a set of arbiters; then using them to both find existing peers and distributing the appearance of that new node to others in the cluster. There is a higher expectation of availability of the nodes used in this role. Should all of them fail, no new node will be able to join the cluster without adjusting their configuration to address this situation.

So the process works a bit like this. When the 10.0.0.101 node attempts to connect to the cluster that is configured with the knowledge, it should expect peers to exist at 10.0.0.1 and 10.0.0.2. Once it has successfully connected to either of these, it can learn about the rest of the topology of the cluster and establish the required connections...