The word "balkanize" is insulting to the people living on the Balkans. It's like calling a fat person an "americanized man".

8GB RAM is 120 EUR. Thats a month of quality food for a single person. Saying hardware is cheap is wrong because it's not cheap. Not for the majority of the people.

Since the Mars rover is not really on Mars, but on a secret location on Earth, perhaps they could just use the "hand of god" to give it a little help :)

The system has heavy traffic and is using nginx http server and PHP workers. We are a high profile target so security, stability, availability and performance are paramount. Some critical components are VMs and have VMware Fault Tolerance enabled on them (essentially, the VM runs on two physical machines).

Comparing the latest OpenBSD to the Ubuntu Server, what are the security advantages of OpenBSD that would warrant it's usage over Ubuntu Server? Ubuntu Server home page boasts quite a lot of security features and I presume it's faster than OpenBSD as well.