A system for using a lease to detect a failure and to perform failure recovery is provided in using this system, a client requests a lease from a server to utilize a resource managed by the server for a period of time. Responsive to the request, the server grants the lease, and the client continually requests renewal of the lease. If the client fails to renew the lease, the server detects that an error has occurred to the client. Similarly, if the server fails to respond to a renew request, the client detects that an error has occurred to the server. As part of the lease establishment, the client and server exchange failure-recovery routines that each invokes if the other experiences a failure.