Although fault tolerant systems are badly needed, their development is not a trivial task. Considering fault tolerant distributed systems, this difficulty is even bigger, and any artifact that could make this task easier becomes highly valuable. In this paper, we propose and model a distributed consensus service and a fault detection service, namely, DisCusS and FuSe, that can be used as building blocks in the development of distributed fault tolerant applications. We also show the compliance of FuSe to FT-CORBA fault detection, and give some insights on the use of the proposed consensus service in a possible FT-CORBA implementation. 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