ROOTVG has always been about improving skills related to AIX and the hardware it runs on. In Feburary 2001 rootvg.net began as the first portal dedicated to the needs of AIX system administrators.
Rootvg is currently owned by John Peck and is hosted on an AIX server he owns and manages. The current webmaster is Michael Felt.
Read More for History and How you make the difference!
History
The ROOTVG Portal was started in February 2001
by Erik Kluit - then working as a freelance web-site designer and AIX
instructor in the Netherlands - as an aid to his students in the
Netherlands. The site developed as a work-in-progress based on
questions he got from students while teaching the AIX System
administration class. It’s current layout ( "Erik's" Rootvg Portal )
was fairly well established late in 2001. In May of 2004 Erik stopped
working as an AIX instructor and sold ROOTVG to a former UK based AIX
instructor, John Peck.
John Peck developed the first widely used AIX testing system Topcat2.
This system was developed on AIX using a very uncommon database for
storing and retrieving questions: the AIX ODM system. John is still the
owner of rootvg and hosts it on an AIX system in a datacenter in the UK.
In late 2006 John approached me (Michael Felt) and asked me to take an
active role in moving ROOTVG from "flat" to "dynamic". The “classical” rootvg portal was
by design a "one-man" show as the content was in so-called flat-html
and navigation was performed in very long menus in frames. Member participation was limited to comments or questions in a single forum/bulletin board.
The last months (November 2006 thru June 2007 for developement and testing) the ROOTVG portal
moved from a largely static site plus forums to one with dynamic
content and formating and new forums.
Today
Although my role of webmaster dates from late 2006 I have actually been involved with ROOTVG from
the start. I still remember the day Erik told me he had registered the domains and I thought - what a great name. In those days we were colleague instructors! And while Erik was still
teaching we discussed additions and
content (there is even a interview of me from 2002) as well as by answering
questions in the forums.
The new,
current, ROOTVG site is maintained in a more modern CMS (Content Manegement System) system based on the opensource package Joomla! and the forums software is from SimpleMachines.
The two package databases, plus extensions, are linked together via
a so-called bridge. Registration on ROOTVG is done via the forums
registration. And discussions regarding content are between myself, John and YOU! I am very interested in what your needs are. Questions and Answers are the driving forces behind ROOTVG. And I am counting on you to provide some of both!
I am very happy that I have found a number of people who have stated that they will add content - and especially happy with those who have already contributed!
Most important to us is providing value - so that you will visit us
often! You - with your Questions and Answers - are our reason for
maintaining this site. Your participation is what makes ROOTVG what it is, and will be important in how it develops further.
Future
We intend to make use of the authoring mechanism of Joomla! and invite new authors to make submissions to the content areas. The portal will eventually be a bit more "eServer" minded in that we are aware that Virtualization and Mobilization of today means there are "other" operating systems, in particular Linux - that will need to co-exist - whether running in a partition or on a seperate system.