Your XML file is a form of state; the tool we generally recommend for keeping state in sync between servers is JBoss Cache.

Using the farm service is definitely not the way to go; it's not meant to be a file distribution mechanism.

If the farm service is not meant for file distribution, is there some other mechanism in JBoss that can be used for this type of service? The reason I ask is that we have a situation that is similar to what andystoy described, where we have some common configuration files that we need to automatically distribute to all servers in the cluster. The main file we want to synchronize between servers is our log4j.xml file, so that all servers have the same logging configuration. All of our other software components are deployable units and we are using farming to do distributed deployment of these components, so that we do not have to manually distribute to each node in the cluster. We would like to have some mechanism to distribute the configuration files (e.g., log4j.xml) from a "master" node to all of the other nodes in the cluster, so that we do not have to copy the files to each server manually (which will not be practical, once we go to a geographically separated environment later this year).

Looks like these are configuration files that you are interested. Can you shared file system to do the job?

As Ben suggested, others like to use a shared file system (JBoss can be configured to deploy from a shared folder).

Regarding the "no deployer available" deployment message that you are receiving, it is true as we expect to only share applications via farm deployment.

After farm deployment, is the xml configuration file accessible to your application on each of the cluster nodes?