On behalf of ISC and Kea team I'm pleased to announce that
new version 1.4.0 is released and available to use!
Welcome to the 1.4.0 release of Kea. Kea is a DHCP implementation
developed by Internet Systems Consortium, Inc. that features fully
functional DHCPv4 and DHCPv6 servers, a dynamic DNS update daemon, a
Control Agent (CA) that provides a REST API to control the DHCP
servers, an example shell client to connect to the CA and a DHCP
performance measurement tool. Both DHCP servers fully support server
discovery, address assignment, renewal, rebinding, release, decline,
information request, DNS updates, client classification and host
reservations. The DHCPv6 server also supports prefix delegation. Lease
information can be stored in a MySQL, PostgreSQL or Cassandra database;
it can also be stored in a CSV file. Host reservations can be stored in
a configuration file; they can also be stored in a MySQL, PostgreSQL,
Cassandra databases and to some degree also retrieved from a RADIUS
server.
Version 1.4.0 adds the following features to Kea:
* High Availability - To provide a highly available service, despite
server failure, two Kea instances can now be configured to run as a
pair. Two modes are supported. In hot standby mode there is a primary
instance handling all traffic and sending updates to its secondary
partner. The secondary monitors the health of the primary and is able
to take over automatically in case the primary fails. In load balancing
mode both partners are active and are handling approximately half of
the traffic traffic. In case of a failure of either server, the partner
is able to take over responding to all traffic directed to both
servers. Support for additional backup servers is implemented. The
backup server's database is updated as soon as possible after changes
are made to the primary server's database, so that it can be used as an
almost drop-in replacement in case of catastrophic failures that take
out both primary and secondary servers. The solution supports both IPv4
and IPv6 and can work with any backend, including memfile. Note that
this is NOT an implementation of the IETF draft DHCPv4 failover (which
does not support DHCPv6).
The HA feature was planned to be a Premium feature, and so it was not
included in the Kea 1.4 open source beta package. During the beta
period we decided to instead offer it as part of the free open source
to enable more users who rely on DHCP failover to migrate to Kea.
* Database improvements - Many Kea users report using multiple Kea
instances sharing a single database backend, or cluster of databases.
One of the frequently requested features was the ability to report
accurate statistics in this case. This surprisingly tricky problem was
solved for MySQL and PostgreSQL by a new stat_cmds hook library and
schema updates. Users also requested the ability to reconnect after
the database connection is lost for whatever reason. '''NOTE''' You
will need to upgrade any existing MySQL and PostgreSQL Kea databases to
the new schema versions. This is readily done using kea-admin:
$ kea-admin lease-upgrade {mysql|pgsql} -u database-user -p
database-password -n database-name
* Cassandra - Kea has had experimental support for a Apache Cassandra
database backend for a while, but the feature hadn't been finished or
fully tested. This has changed: the code now supports host reservations
and has a great number of new smaller fixes and improvements. Its is
now both easier to install and much better documented. Thank you to
Deutsche Telekom AG for sponsoring this work.
* Classification - It is now possible to specify client classes on a
pool level, so you can control who is able to use specific pools, group
similar clients together or even reject clients that don't meet certain
class requirements. Class expressions have expanded capabilities. The
most popular seems to be a member operator, which determines whether
packet is a member of a given class. Two new built in classes - KNOWN
and UNKNOWN - have been added. Complex boolean logic is available. Ever
wanted to do member(foo) and not member(bar)? Now you can.
* Bug fixes and quality of life improvements - With 176 tickets closed
(134 before beta and 42 after beta), 1.4.0 is by far the biggest
release we ever did.
* Extended API - Several new commands have been implemented. This Kea
version supports 65 management commands that allow you to conduct
various operations during operation, such as setting new configuration,
list, retrieve, add or delete subnets, shared networks, host
reservations, leases and much more.
We have also added a new premium hook library, If you purchased the
Kea 1.3.0 premium package before you will be getting an email with
instructions on how to download a free update to the Kea 1.4.0
premium package.
* RADIUS - Kea can now be integrated with an existing RADIUS server.
Both access and accounting roles are supported. Kea is able to send
Access-Request messages and alter its behavio
