Quick tip: Turning off laptop display under Debian 10

I’m running my rusty old ThinkPad T430s Laptop as (quite capable) homelab VM host under Linux/KVM running playground VMs. And because I’m accessing this machine only remotely over RDP I don’t have use for the internal laptop display.

After looking around what is the best way to turn the internal laptop display off I’ve settled for a simple solution using the linux command vbetool.

Install R and RStudio Server on Debian 9

When working on data science problems you’ll probably will come in touch with the well known statistical software package R. While R due his long history is an extremely versatile & powerful system for almost any analytical task it’s not known for his user friendliness and can sometimes be challenging to setup locally.

Install Node.js in Debian 10

To be able to develop with Node.js or to deploy Node.js application on a server there has to be a Node.js runtime installed on the server. Whereas there is Node.js available in the Debian package repository its not the most current Node.js version. Let’s install Node.js in a more current version from a external apt repository.

Setup BIND9 DNS Server on Debian 10 in an internal network

When running different systems on your internal network (e.g. as services on your homelab) it would be nice not to have to memorize the IP addresses of all the server.

You can achieve this by either using the given DNS functionality of your router (e.g. on a tomato router firmware) or by setting up an internal DNS server yourself using the BIND9 DNS server.