A power steering system of an all-terrain buggy vehicle is provided to protect a power assist motor against obstacles encountered during traveling on the irregular ground, or the like. Such a method includes the maintaining of a local reference count for all open distributed data resources within a given node, tracking by a group services client of those nodes that have the open distributed data resources, and using cluster membership services to update the local reference counts for node failures. The physical card includes an identifier that is different from the virtual card identifier, and the physical card is in an inactive state until the physical card is activated by linking of the physical card identifier to the database record of the stored value.