IPFire Mini Appliance 2025 - my experience

[wiza (Ville Saarinen)]

Just wanted to share my experience with the new LWL 2025 Mini appliance. I’m upgrading my network to 2,5 Gbit and the new appliance should be good that for a while. Before 2025 appliance I was running the 2019 Mini.

The installation was a breeze as I was already familiar with IPFire. Tough after out of the box installation some of the RRD graphs didn’t function as they should.

Stopped the vnstat and collectd services. Cleared the /var/log/rrd directory. Started the collectd and vstat back on. After this the graphs started to work as they should.

Also it seem that the appliance is currently suffering from Special register buffer data sampling (CVE-2020-0543) and there is no microcode update for it. For what I understand it requires local access and ability to run some code on the machine, so shouldn’t be a severe problem for now.

Otherwise it has been running smoothly and I’m happy with the appliance.

[ms (Michael Tremer)]

Thank you for your nice review. I really love this appliance.

@wiza

Also it seem that the appliance is currently suffering from Special register buffer data sampling (CVE-2020-0543) and there is no microcode update for it. For what I understand it requires local access and ability to run some code on the machine, so shouldn’t be a severe problem for now.

We have noticed this too, but it seems that the kernel is reporting this incorrectly. The whole CPU family should not be able to suffer from this vulnerability. In the current development branch there is a new kernel since Monday, but I didn’t have a chance yet to see if this problem has been fixed.