1. In a computer system having a shared disk file system running on multiple computer nodes each having their own instance of an operating system and being coupled for parallel data sharing access to files residing on network attached shared disks, a method for managing metadata and for facilitating recovery from a computer node failure and/or a failure of communication among computer nodes, including the steps of: providing independent access to attached shared disks, while maintaining consistency for each file through the use of a distributed token manager and locking mechanism, and transferring metadata for a file to and from said shared disk via a single metadata computer node, while logging metadata updates that could result in inconsistencies in event of a failure independently by each computer node to a shared disk file log accessible to all computer nodes in case of failure in order to avoid the need for a file system scan upon failure of a node.