As I moved to Germany last year, I left my server with a friend in Slovakia with the plan of migrating it sometime later once I find a nice apartment (well that did not happen). With this I thought, I’d also upgrade the hardware as the T430 was not enough for me anymore. So I bought a few used Thinkpad P52 machines that randomly caught my eye at one of Slovak refurbisher e-shops - then I flipped some for profit as I thought, rightfully so, that many other people will be interested in a laptop with 128 gigs of RAM. I kept one of them with Xeon CPU (and 64 GB of non-ECC RAM) for server use.

Hardware

So I had this Thinkpad P52 for quite a while and was planning to use it as a server to replace the aging T430 at some point. I found out that since it has Xeon E-2176M, it supports ECC RAM - up to 128 GB of it. None of the machines I got my hands on came with ECC RAM. So I started looking for … SODIMM ECC RAM. And somehow, it exists and was available in a store just a few meters from where I worked - that was an easy purchase, pricey, but worth it. The P52 also had a SATA controller but no SATA port - so an adapter was required. After I kited it out to its maximum potential, I played with it a little, checked out some features of Windows Server 2025, tried to make GPU pass-through work on Linux with the mobile GPU (after many tries, successfully). I also played around with GVT-g, as the new Intel CPUs do not support it anymore. The new ones are capable of SRIOV but it doesn’t work and Intel keeps postponing its inclusion in the Linux kernel. Throughout all this, I found out that it’s a capable gaming machine.

In January 2025 my friend who, was keeping my T430 server alive, told me to move it the hell out as it was making too much noise. So I stopped messing around and complied and started the migration. It went rather well, all things considered. The poor T430 was always stuck at 3-4 load average, while this new beast was in the low zeroes with the same workload.

As this P52 is quite an overkill, I also planned to use it as my workstation and a gaming rig. Especially to get rid of my regretful purchase of T14 Gen 3 - which is such a joke of a laptop. This is where the possibility of GPU passthrough (and even partitioning) came in handy. I run both Linux and Windows on it. Not ideal, but I have yet to come up with something better. The machine is handling all of this quite well.

There are a few drawbacks compared to T430 though - loss of Coreboot and higher power consumption. But I compensate for the latter by using it as a workstation as well.

Monitoring and alerting

Finally I switched from Zabbix to Prometheus. Mainly just because I always wanted to switch. And then my Zabbix setup broke after some updates and migrations, and I did not want to mess around with it. Also, for the future migration to Kubernetes, Prometheus will be much easier to implement.

Bookmarks sync

I also have a long-term desire to get out of Nextcloud “ecosystem”. It also keeps breaking for me on every other update, one of the updates to the Android app made it completely unusable. So one of the Nextcloud features I needed to replace was Nextcloud Bookmarks. I used it in combination with the Floccus browser extension and the Nextcloud Bookmarks app on Android. After testing various services like Linkding, Wallabag, xbrowsersync, Linkdwarden I finally settled for Linkwarden. It is compatible with Floccus extesnion and has a nice Linkdroid client for Android. I also set up git synchronization in Floccus to my Gitea instance - not only to keep my bookmarks but also browser tabs - and the history of both. This could produce too much data in git but that’s a problem for later.

Syncthing

This was on my wishlist for quite some time, ever since I realized that it is not so taxing on the phone’s battery. The file synchronization is much more “low-level” (compared to Nextcloud photo uploads) and I kept hearing from friends and colleagues that it’s a set-and-forget setup that has worked for them for years. So one less feature keeping me on Nextcloud. Though I still haven’t migrated my data fully.

Operating system

I stopped using Debian for a while - my T14 Gen 3 workstation ran Fedora and my P52 runs CachyOS. It is more of an exploration - I will switch back to Debian on the next occasion. One thing does not change though - there is still Windows and Android, as I really cannot replace those two reasonably well.