Hello, you can easily mount a lock that auto-releases itself after some timeout using the new (2.6.13) extended SET command (see http://redis.io/commands/set) or simply a Lua script.
Even given this, bad lock timing (not that likely) or a crash (more likely) could let inconsistency in.
Shrugs
Like I said, my problem is not really Redis's. If I can't trust everything that uses a lock not to crash 99.99% of the time I should really be looking at our jobs and not at Redis.
Even then, though, it's probably more a matter of me not trusting things than it is said things not actually being trustworthy.
I'd be interested to hear about your implementation if you can share (email is HN username at gmail.com)