A Potted History of the "Minnie" Server

— Warren Toomey, September 2025

I've been running my Internet server Minnie since the early 1990s, generally with downtimes of only a few hours per year (and a couple of physical/virtual "moves"). I think she might be one of the longest-running Internet servers, especially one that's been owned and managed by the same person/organisation.

This is a brief history of Minnie: her hardware, software, users and my motivation for having a server and keeping her running.

Before Minnie Existed

Lets go back to the late 1980s. I graduated with a B.Sc (Hons) from the University of New England, majoring in Computer Science: yes, the subject before IT existed. During my Honours year at U.N.E, I was introduced to amateur radio and I'd gained my limited amateur radio license. This only allowed me to transmit on VHF and UHF amateur frequencies, but it did let me operate an amateur packet radio station.

In 1989 I moved down to Canberra in the Australian Capital Territory and purchased a PK-88 Packet Controller (shown above) to be my home packet radio node, along with a 10MHz IBM XT clone and a 2-metre amateur radio transceiver.

I met up with the amateur radio people in the ACT and soon got set up with my PK-88 and chatting with them at 1,200 bits per second using the horrible AX.25 protocol.

This was a time when Australia had only just been connected to the Internet. Luckily, I was now working at the Australian Defence Force Academy which had Internet access. I started to devour the RFCs for the Internet protocols, e.g. RFC 791 and RFC 793. These protocols looked really cool; I just wished there was a way to use them with amateur radio.

Then I came across KA9Q NOS. Wow! This was a complete implementation for TCP, IP and several application-layer protocols for a PC running MS-DOS. You could add an Ethernet card to your PC and talk to other machines on a LAN, and/or connect via a serial link to a packet controller (e.g. my PK-88) and send TCP/IP packets over amateur radio. KA9Q provided things like an FTP client and server, an SMTP client and server, along with ping and telnet.

Using KA9Q I could turn my own PC into a network server and connect it to my PK-88. The other Canberra packet radio operators (also using KA9Q) could send me files and e-mails and I could do the same in return. Fantastic!

I dreamed of the day when I could actually access the real Internet from home, not just the other amateur radio boxes in the ACT. But, in Australia (and many other countries), it was illegal to connect amateur packet radio devices to non-amateur radio devices: only licensed amateur radio operators were permitted to transmit on amateur radio frequencies. And, at this point in time, the Internet hadn't been opened up to the general public: there were no ISPs in Australia in the late 1990s.

Minnie as a Packet Radio Gateway

Worldwide, the amateur packet radio community had been allocated the IP address range 44.0.0.0/8, i.e. 16 million IP addresses, and these had been subnetted and parceled out to those countries that had amateur radio: the AMPRnet. It seemed crazy that we had all these amateur radio IP subnets with no way of connecting them together. Where the amateur radio subnets were physically adjacent (e.g. on the US/Canada border), people did set up PCs to act as routers (also known as gateways) to route packets between the subnets.

Here in Australia, we were just too far away from any other subnets to use this technique to connect to other countries. Damn! Then, some bright spark came up with the idea of encapsulating the amateur IP packets (addresses 44.X.X.X) into normal Internet packets using the IP in IP protocol. Using this, we could set up an AMPRnet gateway that used the Internet as an opaque link layer to move our amateur packets to other AMPRnet gateways.

Because our AMPRnet packets were always hidden inside other IP packets, us amateur operators couldn't see the real Internet and the machines on the real Internet couldn't see the AMPRnet traffic. This preserved the legality of packet radio operation: only licensed operators could transmit, but all amateur radio operators in all countries are licensed, so that's OK!

As I worked at ADFA, I was in the perfect physical location to set up such an AMPRnet gateway. I bought a WD8003E network card for my PC, took it to work and set it up to do IP over IP. The actual amateur link was a bit convoluted but eventually the ACT amateur radio operators had access to my gateway, which I named Minnie.

Here's a link to a document that I wrote at the time, "Setting up a Packet-Internet Gateway", which was a how-to for others to do the same as I had done.

I don't have an exact date when Minnie began operation as an AMPrnet gateway. According to this e-mail from Carl Makin (who was the president of the ACT Amateur Radio Club), dated May 13 1992:

I'm going in to the site tomorrow to examine what is needed to mount the antenna. ... The ACT has 8 Class C addresses assigned to it. How about I give you 44.136.7.128/25 i.e, half a Class C subnet to play with. I assume you will be segregated from the other Amateur IP networks (with gateways perhaps) so it will simplify routing if we do it this way.

So, Minnie began operation as an AMPRnet (i.e. non-Internet) server in mid-1992.

Becoming a Real Internet Server

One of the nice things about the KA9Q NOS software was that, if you set up an mail or file server on the box, it was visible to anybody who could send IP packets to it. Minnie, as an AMPRnet gateway, was visible on the 44.X.X.X AMPRnet network. But she had a real Internet address: 131.236.20.90. That made her visible to the whole Internet.

Back when I was at U.N.E, I'd gotten into the Minix operating system as I really loved Unix and I wanted to have a Unix system on my own PC. This is why I bought my 10MHz IBM XT clone in the first place, along with a 30 Megabyte Seagate ST238R hard drive. This is also where Minnie's name comes from: my interest in the Minix operating system. As well, I was a great fan of the Goon Show radio series; one of the characters in the show is named Minnie Bannister.

At some point I upgraded my PC to be an AT clone with a few megabytes of RAM, leaving the XT clone free to go to work and become Minnie.

At the time, Andy Tanenbaum would release upgrades to Minix by posting patches to the Minix source code to the comp.os.minix Usenet newsgroup. I'd started with Minix 1.1 on floppies and, like many other people, I had to save all the patches which Andy sent out to upgrade Minix, first to 1.2, then 1.3, then 1.5.

I'd kept all the patches, and lots of the other big comp.os.minix posting by other people, on a hard drive at home. You'd frequently see people asking for this patch that they'd missed, or that patch. I could e-mail the patches I'd kept out to these people, but of course there was a better way.

All I had to do was make these files available on Minnie. She was connected to the Internet at ADFA with a real IP address and 30 Megabytes of disk space. On May 10 1991, after putting all the big comp.os.minix messages in a directory on Minnie and turning on the FTP server, I announced the archive of Minix messages to Usenet:

From: wkt@rodos2.cs.adfa.oz.au (Warren Toomey)
Newsgroups: comp.archives
Subject: [minix] *** New Minix Anon Ftp Site - minnie.cs.adfa.oz.au
Keywords: anonymous ftp minix archive useful
Message-ID: <1991May15.042857.5397@ox.com>
Date: 15 May 91 04:28:57 GMT
Followup-To: comp.os.minix
Lines: 55
Approved: e...@msen.com (Edward Vielmetti, MSEN)

I've finally got an Ethernet board so I can devote my old PC as a Minix
anonymous ftp archive. It's called minnie.cs.adfa.oz.au,
address 131.236.20.90. It has nearly EVERY large posting in comp.os.minix
since 1.5. If you can't find it on minnie, it wasn't posted in comp.os.minix!
...
        Warren Toomey


       Warren Toomey VK1XWT, slow kermiting.
      Deep in the bowels of ADFA Comp Science.
  `The key that I thought opened the door doesn't'

May 10 1991 is the official date when Minnie became an Internet server. Here is the full Usenet posting of the event.

Aside: at some point I upgraded Minnie's software from KA9Q to JNOS.

Oops! History Backwards

OK, so I've got my history backwards. I thought that Minnie was an AMPRnet radio gateway first and became an Internet server after that. No, it's the other way around: Internet server in May 1991 and AMPRnet gateway in mid-1992. Oh well. The history and motivation is interesting (at least to me!) so I'm going to leave the AMPRnet stuff in. Sorry if you read through it and wished you hadn't.

BSD Arrives

You remember that I desperately wanted a Unix-like system at home, as I really couldn't stand MS-DOS. I'd been using Minix as a stop-gap solution but it wasn't a real Unix.

Then 386BSD came out in March 1992. This was electric! Here was a full 4.X BSD system, derived from real Unix, running on a 80386 processor and requiring a hundred Megabytes or so of disk space and a few Megabytes of RAM. All my dreams had come true!

There was a heap of turmoil when 386BSD came out, especially that improvements and patches were not being accepted by Bill Jolitz, hence the arrival of the FreeBSD and NetBSD forks.

In 1993 I closed my Minix journal and started a BSD journal. Here is the first entry:

Henry was my home machine: a 386DX PC with 16 Megabytes of RAM. After trying NetBSD, I switched over to FreeBSD and really loved it. It made me realise that Minnie's days as an XT running JNOS on top of MS-DOS were over. An entry from my journal in February 1994 says:

And Now, the Web

Also in February 1994, I went to an AUUG (Australian Unix Users Group) summer conference (see this link, 10am) and found out about the existence of the world-wide web. I'd also seen the Mosaic web browser in action. With FreeBSD running on Minnie, it seemed like a good idea to set up a web server on her. The NCSA HTTPd server v1.1 had been released at the end of Jan 1994. It was the obvious choice to be the web server on Minnie.

Fortunately, I've been an avid hoarder of files and data ever since I accidentally deleted a 2,000 word essay at university. I still have copies of Minnie's backups from the 1990s.

The web logs show me testing the service locally at ADFA on Feb 23 1994, with the first international web fetches on Feb 26:

sparcserve.cs.adfa.oz.au [Wed Feb 23 16:33:13 1994] GET / HTTP/1.0
sparcserve.cs.adfa.oz.au [Wed Feb 23 16:33:18 1994] GET /BSD.html HTTP/1.0
sparcserve.cs.adfa.oz.au [Wed Feb 23 16:33:20 1994] GET /Images/demon1.gif HTTP/1.0
...
estcs1.estec.esa.nl [Sat Feb 26 01:48:21 1994] GET /BSD-info/BSD.html HTTP/1.0
estcs1.estec.esa.nl [Sat Feb 26 01:48:30 1994] GET /BSD-info/Images/demon1.gif HTTP/1.0
estcs1.estec.esa.nl [Sat Feb 26 01:49:46 1994] GET /BSD-info/cdrom.html HTTP/1.0
shazam.cs.iastate.edu [Sat Feb 26 06:31:20 1994] GET /BSD-info/BSD.html HTTP/1.0
shazam.cs.iastate.edu [Sat Feb 26 06:31:24 1994] GET /BSD-info/Images/demon1.gif HTTP/1.0
dem0nmac.mgh.harvard.edu [Sat Feb 26 06:32:04 1994] GET /BSD-info/BSD.html HTTP/1.0
dem0nmac.mgh.harvard.edu [Sat Feb 26 06:32:10 1994] GET /BSD-info/Images/demon1.gif HTTP/1.0

I must have mentioned the web site in one of the Usenet BSD newsgroups, hence the fetches of BSD-related information on Feb 26.

For your enjoyment, I've restored a snapshot of the web site on Minnie from around mid-1994. It is visible at https://minnie.tuhs.org/94Web/. Some hyperlinks are, of course, broken.

A Photo of Minnie

This is the only photo of Minnie that I have; sorry that the image size is so small, I've lost the original print. This is in my office at ADFA. Minnie's monitor and keyboard are on the right, next to my Sun workstation.

The photo's date must be sometime after November 1994, as it corresponds roughly with this entry in my BSD journal:

Minnie's Mail Service

Back when Minnie was running as a packet radio gateway, I'd set up a mail service so that amateur radio people in the ACT could send me e-mail with the address vk1xwt@minnie.vk1xwt.ampr.org. They had to add my AMPRnet address 44.136.0.31 into their hosts file to make it work.

At some point I asked the IT people at ADFA if they could put in some DNS mail records for minnie.cs.adfa.edu.au, which they did. The first e-mail I received on Minnie from an Internet person is dated May 13 1992:

From alan@frey.newcastle.edu.au Wed May 13 10:25:00 1992
Received: from minnie.cs.adfa.oz.au by csadfa.cs.adfa.oz.au (5.61/1.34)
        id AA06596; Wed, 13 May 92 10:24:59 +1000
Received: by frey.newcastle.edu.au id AA01876
  (5.65c/IDA-1.4.4 for wkt@minnie.cs.adfa.oz.au); Wed, 13 May 1992 10:06:18 +1000
From: Alan Hargreaves <alan@frey.newcastle.edu.au>
Message-Id: <199205130006.AA01876@frey.newcastle.edu.au>
Subject: minnie & wnos4
To: wkt@minnie.cs.adfa.oz.au
Date: Wed, 13 May 92 10:06:18 EST

...

This was when I was running either KA9Q NOS or JNOS on the XT box. When I upgraded the hardware and software to a 386DX40 and FreeBSD, I turned on Sendmail. The first e-mail I can find that Sendmail received is this:

Received: from nic.funet.fi (nic.funet.fi [128.214.248.6]) by minnie.cs.adfa.oz.au (8.3/8.3) with ESMTP id EAA03684; Sun, 27 Feb 1994 04:53:08 +1100

which indicates that I started with Sendmail version 8.3. Now (2025) I'm using Postfix instead.

The Unix Heritage Society and Minnie

I've written elsewhere about why I started the PDP-11 Unix Preservation Society which eventually became the Unix Heritage Society (TUHS).

Since the beginning, Minnie has been the TUHS FTP, mail and web server and she has been providing sterling service for the TUHS members for over thirty years. At the present time, September 2025, we have 880 people on the TUHS mailing list and 9 Gigabytes of files in the Unix Archive.

In 2022, I was greatly honoured to receive the Flame Award from Usenix for founding and maintaining the TUHS service.

Minnie's Hardware Over Time

From the early 1990s through to 2010, Minnie was a physical box which I owned. To begin with, she sat next to me in my office. Then she moved down into the server room in the Computer Science department at ADFA. And when I changed jobs to work at Bond University, she moved into the main server room there.

Here's a table of Minnie hardware configuration which I've been able to put together that covers this period.

Around 2010, due to policy reasons, Bond asked me to move Minnie out of their server room and I decided to make her a virtual server by purchasing a Linode VM. She's been with Linode ever since.

Right from the beginning, I decided that I would never ask for donations to keep Minnie running or to upgrade her. This has given me full control over what software she runs and how it's configured. Sometimes this has been a royal pain (e.g. fighting with DKIM, SPF and friends to ensure the mail service was "acceptable" to other mail servers), but in general I've had to do very little care and feeding each week with Minnie.

The tuhs.org Domain Name

I'd moved to Canberra, ACT in 1989. By the end of the 1990s I was getting sick of the climate there: too hot in summer, way too cold in winter, and the houses were not designed for either extreme. I started to throw my hat in the ring to find teaching positions elsewhere, eventually getting a job at Bond University in mid-2001.

I knew that moving jobs meant that I would lose Minnie's existing domain name, minnie.cs.adfa.edu.au. So it was time to get my own domain name. I purchased the tuhs.org domain on May 15, 2000. For a short period of time in 2000 and 2001, Minnie had both her ADFA domain name and the name minnie.tuhs.org. I set up two virtual web sites on Minnie: http://minnie.tuhs.org hosts my personal stuff and http://www.tuhs.org hosts the files for the Unix Heritage Society.

I haven't gone back through my backups to find out when I switched up to SSL on the web sites to make them https://minnie.tuhs.org and https://www.tuhs.org. I know it was a logistical ordeal at the time. Fortunately we now have Let's Encrypt to make things easier for the small web sites like Minnie.

Minnie as the OzTiVo Server

By the 2000s, Minnie was a mail, file and web server, and running the TUHS mailing list. Then, for a while, she served out TV guide data for thousands of Australian TV set-top boxes. Here is the story of how this happened.

I knew Andrew Tridgell ("tridge", the creator of Samba and rsync) when I lived in Canberra in the late 1990s; he is one of the few geniuses that I have met. At this time, Australians had 625-line PAL analogue TV and VHS video recorders.

Tridge had imported a Series 1 TiVo from the states, knowing full-well that it wouldn't work here in Australia (NTSC vs PAL), but that didn't deter him. After some weeks of register banging on the device, he was able to get it to record and play back PAL signals. I saw his talk at AOSS 3 in Canberra in 2001, and I knew that I had to get one.

I moved up to the Gold Coast in 2001 and I got my first S1 TiVo soon after. I can't describe how amazing the TiVo concept was at the time: the ability to record TV shows by name and not by date/time, to record and play back at the same time, the ability to quickly skip ads etc.

One big problem with the initial TiVo work was the lack of good TV guide data. Tridge had done some initial work on generating guide data. I took his work and wrote a much larger system to scrape TV guide websites and generate the guide 'slices' that the TiVo needs. At the same time, I set up the OzTiVo mailing list so that we could form a community to help each other out.

The community took off in a big way and it turned into the OzTiVo community. I expanded my guide data system so that it produced data for all the states and regions in Australia. I improved the TiVo mothership emulator from TiVoCanada so that the OzTiVos could download the guide slides that my system was generating. Several of us hacked the TiVo software to know about the Australian mothership and to make it easy to configure the system here.

At the peak of operation we had over 1,200 OzTiVos phoning home each week. Then, when I modified the system to output XML data, we had up to 20,000 Australian set-top devices downloading data each week. In 2005 I wrote a paper which described our community and the system that we had set up.

Around the peak of operation, I started to get burned out and other members of the OzTiVo community stepped in to help keep the OzTiVo service on Minnie running. Eventually, we moved the service out to another system. It was immense fun and crazy hard work at times, but I found the sense of community amazing.

Conclusion

In May 1991 I announced the FTP service on minnie.cs.adfa.edu.au to the Usenet comp.os.minix newsgroup. The files, now here, have been publicly available on Minnie for over 34 years. Since then, Minnie has served as my personal e-mail server, and she has served the Minix, BSD, TUHS and OzTiVo communities.

It's been an amazing journey over the past three decades. I've learned so much along the way about system administration, system security etc. I remember being young (OK, in my 20s) and just throwing myself head-first into learning about daemons, config files, debugging problems, version control, the TCP/IP protocols and more. Now I'm nearing the age of 60 and the enthusiasm of youth has dwindled away. I'm very glad that Minnie has settled down into a sedate life with very few issues, problems or configuration changes required now.

I certainly hope that I will be able to keep Minnie running for as long as I'm here on this planet! Perhaps one day I'll pass her on to some of the TUHS folk to keep her going, but I will always have the wkt@tuhs.org e-mail address.

Minnie, thanks for all the service you've given us over the decades!