At present (December 2015), Minnie is a 2.5GHz Xeon virtual machine with 2G of RAM and 48G of SSD disk space, and is hosted by Linode. It is running Ubuntu. It provides anonymous ftp, many mailing lists, a web server and some CGI scripts, and is the prime repository for the Unix Archive. No user accounts are available.
Minnie is fully funded out of my own pocket. Donations, expressions of gratitude and constructive criticisms welcome :-) Minnie is run with minimal housekeeping - I'm a full-time teacher. Your patience is very much appreciated.
In mid-1988 I bought a 10MHz XT clone to play with Minix; I was also an avid Goon Show fan. By January 1989, the machine had been christened `Minnie'. At the end of 1989 I took a job at ADFA and bought a 386SX to replace the XT. In May 1991, Minnie (the XT) was brought in to work to become a small FTP server for my Minix and amateur radio interests. Here is the original announcement of the ftp site on Minnie (and cache).
From 1990 to 2000, Minnie's hardware was the hand-me-down equipment from my home PC, running a not-so-recent operating system. In 2000, I bought a new Celeron to break the trend. Here is a table showing Minnie's configuration since 1990. It's interesting to see how the figures have changed.
| Period Starting | CPU | Disk Capacity | Memory | Net Connection | Operating System |
| Early 1990 | 10MHz 8088 | 30M RLL | 640K | 10Base2 | KA9Q NOS |
| Circa 1992 | 20MHz 286 | 80M ESDI | 2M | 10Base2 | JNOS |
| March 1993 | 33MHz 386SX | 140M ESDI | 4M | 10Base2 | 386BSD 0.1 |
| Circa 1994 | 40MHz 386DX | 140M ESDI - 1G IDE | 8M | 10Base2 | FreeBSD 1.1.5.1 |
| Circa 1996 | 100MHz 486 | 4G - 16G IDE | 16 - 32M | 10BaseT | FreeBSD 2.2.8, 3.2 |
| May 2000 | 400MHz Celeron | 28G - 40G ATA | 64M | 100BaseTX | FreeBSD 4-STABLE |
| June 2004 | 500MHz P3 | 40G - 60G ATA | 192M | 100BaseTX | FreeBSD 4-STABLE |
| June 2005 | 2.4GHz P4 | 320G ATA | 768M | 1000BaseTX | FreeBSD 5-STABLE |
| June 2009 | 2.4GHz P4 | 500G ATA | 768M | 1000BaseTX | Ubuntu 9.04 |
The 486DX with FreeBSD was the best, most reliable old box I've ever had. She commonly had uptimes well over 70 days, with a few times over 100 days. The main reason for crashes was power failures; we typically have 2 or 3 a year. On the last day of her service, the 486 pumped out 1.2G of HTTP, 2.2G of FTP and 3.7G of rsync traffic. The system load never rose above 2.5.
Sometime around 2010 I had to move Minnie out of her physical existence in Australia and into a virtual existence. I should try to dig out the date when this occurred.
Here's a graph of Minnie's main hardware details over time, with dotted lines showing a line of best fit. I've left out the changeover to a virtual system. It seems like Moore's Law works over the given time period.