Book excerpt: This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second European Dependable Computing Conference, EDCC-2, held in Taormina, Italy, in October 1996. The book presents 26 revised full papers selected from a total of 66 submissions based on the reviews of 146 referees. The papers are organized in sections on distributed fault tolerance, fault injection, modelling and evaluation, fault-tolerant design, basic hardware models, testing, verification, replication and distribution, and system level diagnosis.