Hi, With the release of a Squid security fix on December 30 2007 we have entered a new maintenance phase for the SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 (SLES 8) line of products. Following product life time changes become active as of now: 1. Extended Maintenance for a SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 subset Following subset of products have now entered extended maintenance: - SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 for x86 (Intel 32bit) - SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 for IBM S/390 and IBM zSeries (S/390 31bit) Using this maintenance extension requires an additional subscription. The conditions and how-to-buy for the extension are shown in the following 2 page document: http://www.novell.com/rc/docrepository/public/14/basedocument.2007-11-05.205... To migrate your machine to SLES 8 Extended Maintenance, replace in the files: /var/adm/YaST/ProdDB/prod_* the line (if present): =YouPath: i386/update/SuSE-SLES/8 by: =YouPath: i386/update/SuSE-SLES/8-EXTENDED (replace i386 by s390 for the the S/390 version). 2. End of Life for the rest of the SLES 8 architectures Following products have reached End of Life, support for them is discontinued and no more updates will be published for them: - SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 for AMD64 (AMD 64bit) - SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 for IPF (Intel Itanium) - SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 for IBM zSeries (IBM zSeries 64bit) - SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 for IBM iSeries and IBM pSeries (IBM PowerPC) Currently the following additional SUSE Linux Enterprise Server products exist and are in maintenance (regular / extended maintenance): - SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 (regular maintenance until July 30th 2009) - SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 (regular maintenance until July 31st 2011) Please see the product lifecycle page at http://support.novell.com/lifecycle/ for more information. So lets take a look back at the history of SLES 8... SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 was released end of October 2002, making its regular maintenance lifetime 5 years. SLES 8 was based on the UnitedLinux development also done by SUSE which was a cooperation between SUSE, Caldera, Connectiva and TurboLinux. The Linux kernel was originally 2.4.19, but was upgraded to 2.4.21 base with Service Pack 3. Some statistics regarding our online updates: Total: 696 (367 active) Security: 517 (251 active) Recommended: 156 (104 active) Optional: 21 ( 12 active) YAST: 2 ( 0 active) Top issues (with 5 or more updates): 32 kernel 26 mod_php4 20 ethereal 14 mozilla 13 samba 13 cups 11 squid 9 openssl 9 mysql 8 sendmail 8 openssh 8 cyrus-imapd 7 libpng 7 heimdal 7 gpg 7 cvs 6 xshared 6 timezone 6 rsync 6 openldap2 5 tcpdump 5 snort 5 ruby 5 qt3 5 mc 5 libtiff 5 laus 5 java2 5 fetchmail 5 dhcp-server 5 bind9 5 apache Ciao, Marcus -- Working, but not speaking, for the following german company: SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nuernberg)