One of the problems of middleware for shared state is that they are designed, explicitly or implicitly, for symmetric networks. However, since the Internet is not symmetric, end-to-end process connectivity cannot be guaranteed. Our solution to this is to provide the middleware with a network abstraction layer that masks the asymmetry of the network and provides the illusion of a symmetric network. We describe the communication service of our middleware, the Distribution Subsystem~(DSS), which carefully separates connections to remote processes from the protocols that communicate over them. This separation is used to plug-in a peer-to-peer module to provide symmetric and persistent connectivity. The P2P module can provide both up-to-date addresses for mobile processes as well as route discovery to overcome asymmetric links.