Minnie is a 400MHz Celeron with 64M of memory, 28G of hard disk and is running FreeBSD 4-STABLE. It provides anonymous ftp, many mailing lists, an NNTP news client, a web server and some CGI scripts, and access to the PUPS 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 lecturer. 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. Minnie (the XT) was brought in to work to become a small FTP server for my Minix and amateur radio interests.
Since then, Minnie's hardware has always been the hand-me-down equipment from my home PC, running a not-so-recent operating system. Finally, 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 ATA | 64M | 100BaseTX | FreeBSD 4-STABLE |
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. I'm hoping that the new Celeron will give me the same years of faithful service. My friend Callum has sent in a nice graph of the above table: