Embodiments of the invention provide a method, system, and computer program product for selecting a server as a selected server for performing a specified function in a distributed computing system. In one embodiment, the method comprises identifying a group of servers in the system; and choosing as the selected server the server that has been in the system the longest. In one embodiment, each of the servers in the group has a respective contention period, during which the server sends a contention message, and the selected server is chosen using these contention messages. The servers in the group may have imperfect clock synchronization. In this case, the contention periods of the servers is kept greater than the maximum difference between the server clocks. The invention may be used to select a name server, or to select a server for another service.