Hey guys!

I hope everyone here has been ok and has had great holidays! After a long hiatus from the forums working myself like crazy in real life, I have come to the realization that working too much does not make one richer or happier, in fact I can't think of anyone that has become rich by working hard, so this year I'm cutting it back to normal levels in order to also have a little bit of a life!

For all the new members in the forums that don't know me, Hi guys and girls! I'm NeoGen, and I hail from the Natural state of Arkansas, in the USA. I am originally from Portugal as my profiles show.
There seems to have been plenty going on around here while I was out, I will try to catch up and read about the most recent events. There are so many events going on in projects that it's even scary, I plugged in PrimeGrid just yesterday and was flooded with a number of notifications about ongoing and upcoming events.

As I was away from here I never stopped crunching, in fact I've been purchasing hardware part by part slowly every month to increase my crunching capacity and expand my personal "home office" equipment. I am now proudly running a home made VMWare 5.5 server, with an FX-8370 8 core CPU, 32Gb of RAM, 5.5Tb of storage and a Radeon 7970. The motherboard has PCI Passthrough, which allows me to assign the GPU to a Virtual Machine and crunch GPU tasks through it. I'm still creating and configuring more virtual machines for crunching but I have to balance it out just right because I also want to have a Database server VM and a few more things running there.

I have also built my own firewall appliance part by part, using an AMD R-Series 464L cpu, 16Gb of RAM and running the latest version of Pfsense. I'm going to rebuild that firewall this year though, I want to move it over to an AMD G-Series GX-420CA, which is less powerful but still overkill for my needs. The R-Series 464L will in turn be used for home media center, and I'm planning to run OpenElec on it. Will just need to purchase a remote and IR sensor. I'm already using Serviio for serving media content to a smart TV at home, but the smart TV user interface is so slow and buggy that I have to try and get my own media center to work.
Apart from that I have an assortment of bits and pieces from different experiments and upgrades, last year I did have a small mini-ITX Storage server up and running with FreeNAS, but then I took it offline and used many of its parts for the VMWare server so now it's just an empty shell.

Well... I got to get back to work. I'm at work right now and although it's pretty dead today, I still got to try and do something, right?


Talk to you all soon!