I want to test a distributed program resistance to random crashes of each node. I need to use some random distribution that would control how often each node would crash - for example, it might be normal distribution with an average of 2 hours or something else.
How do I choose that distribution law and how do I decide what values to assign to the distribution parameters?
As Rosh Oxymoron points out, it would be odd if the arrival times of crashes were anything but independent. However, that makes me think that the correct way to model this behavior is as a Poisson process. That means your arrival times would be based on the exponential distribution. The rate parameter of the distribution is something you probably want to come up with empirically by looking at data of your current crash rate.