Hi...

I've inherited some SuSE Linux Enterprise 8.1 servers, in production as caching servers. I'm interested in bringing them up to date as far as security patches are concerned, but I don't know where to begin. As far as I can tell, they're as up to date as I can get them with YOU, but, for example, I know that the kernel version (2.4.21-231-smp) isn't the latest 2.4 kernel.

Wondering where to begin to figure out which installed packages pose security risks and should be updated.

Any suggestions would be appreciated! Thanks!

you's main job is security updates, so if there is no updates there,it's safe to assume you are up to date.

as far as the kernel goes, if it ain't broke don't fix it.

That's pretty much what I figured... it just seems SuSE has no love for SLES 8 anymore, so I wasn't sure if there were no more updates because there were no more security concerns, or if there were no more updates because Novell stopped publishing them and moved on to bigger and better versions.

good point. 8.x desktop version has been moved to the discontiued directory, but SLES 8.x still seems to have patches available. latest was a kernel patch (31 may 06)
http://support.novell.com/linux/psdb/i386SuSESLES8.html