An ongoing project of the Highly Dependable Systems Research Programme (PHDS) at the University of the Witwatersrand is the development of a dependable autonomous decentralised system using readily available hardware and software components. The experimental system consists of Unix stations connected by ethernet. Real-time communication protocols and fault tolerant protocols have implemented as a fault-tolerant real-time environment to support various applications. Inspired from South African industry's requirement, the Internet service redirector is chosen as the application of the PHDS system. A firewall application has been implemented on the virtual redirector. Current work on this project includes: introduction of mobile agent technology into the system and implementation of a testbed to evaluate the availability and performance of the system.