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Non-Tech : Trading with Castle Online -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Pullin-GS who wrote (73)	2/4/1998 7:55:00 PM
From: Street Walker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186

Public Relations.......... Maybe you should apply for a position at Castle. You seem to have a great understanding for what it takes to do PR. I agree. The team at Castle has been superb, up to this point in regards to PR. Hope the new kid catches the same spirit. I wonder if Glen knows if this guy is representing Castle here on SI. I would much more prefer Ed, Ira, or Mary if there is no improvement. There should exist no abrasiveness. I made ALOT of money for Castle last year. I want the best for my money. I too would like to be informed more of the specifics as to why the key has had some problems, and what is being done. We're a trading family. Give us some details. Us in Pete Barry's Chat room are pretty upset with unreliablity. S.W.

To: Pullin-GS who wrote (73)	2/5/1998 10:57:00 AM
From: Paul darby	Respond to of 186

None of my responses were meant to be sarcastic or disrespectful. I apologize if they came across that way. That's one of the problems with this type of forum. Everyone interperets things differently. My only point was that when a trade is missed for whatever reason, they are the ones that get focused on the most. We've all said "could have" done this or that plenty of times. That's just not a productive way to trade. There are opportunities every minute of the day. Go on to the next one. Fair enough? Maybe my first attempt at trying to get some answers to people on here didn't go as smoothly as it should have. This was not meant to be the place where Castle is providing customer support. I was only trying to provide some truth to rumors and answer technical questions people may have. I'll stick to that. Castle is working extremely hard on improving the reliability of our system. As you mentioned, no online broker is perfect. Through suggestions and comments from all of our customers we will make the KillKey the best trading system available. The long talked about JavaKey is being tested and will be released shortly. For those interested in the progress please email: cast@panix.com Any other questions just call 800.661.5133 Thanks Paul Castleonline

To: Pullin-GS who wrote (73)	3/11/1998 1:13:00 PM
From: Pullin-GS	Respond to of 186

Castle has been down for some time today. :( I understand the problem is a connectivity issue with the service provider. I would imagine that in many instances a diverse path (preferably to another provider) could have prevented this type of outage (unless of course it was a regional fiber cut). Is Castle's primary connectivity supplied via a Bell Atlantic nailed-up circuit? Then why not install a backup router and ISDN PRI (negotiate pay-for-use tariffing of course) at Castle Headquarters, and a second router at the destination (assuming that all trades coming from the Internet get funneled into a private network for other brokers.). A second Internet connection can be established with another carrier along with a diverse path as well. BGP-4 peering could be established between Castle and the two providers giving true load sharing of the total available bandwidth to the Internet (not just a backup if one fails). This would cover outages that effect the internet traders, as well as cover outages to the private broker network that Castle connects to. An added benifit would be that Internet traffic capacity would be effectivly doubled if the backup line was of the same bandwidth. I designed and implemented Advest's network from 1992-1994 (I worked for they're primary provider). They utilized fully redundant technologies at there core locations, and non-redundant at they're edge 100+ locations nationwide and I assure the readers here that this type of outage is preventable in most cases.