Could you point me to some literature for this networking problem?

Hi!

I just started learning about network programming this semester in a class. With the Covid situation, the class was completely online and only consisted of a few mediocre student presentations. We have to do a final Python project and I'm at a total loss as to how to approach this. There wasn't any literature provided, and to be honest, I don't even understand what we are supposed to do (or what to google). So I was wondering if you could point me to some literature that I can work through to understand what I'm supposed to do?

I've never been in a situation where I didn't even know what to google, this is pretty embarrassing. I'd really appreciate your help!

The problem we're supposed to solve says to "determine a master from a set of equal servers. Make sure to avoid a split brain scenario. The conditions under which the master is determined have to be clear. Actions executed on the master (or non-master) should be freely configurable (e.g by running a python or shell script)."