[Kea-announce] Kea 1.6.3, a stable production release of Kea, is now available

[Michael McNally]

Internet Systems Consortium is pleased to announce the release of Kea 1.6.3.

Kea releases are divided into two branch sequences:

1)  A current stable branch (currently 1.6.x) which receives only important
     bug fixes and is otherwise feature-stable, and

2)  An experimental development branch (currently 1.7.x) where new features
     are added and made available for testing during development, before eventually
     being included in the next stable release branch.

Kea 1.6.3 is the latest release in the current stable branch.

Normally a stable release branch would be considered feature-complete at this
point, with new features being reserved for the development branch, but we have
made an exception in 1.6.3 to add support for API calls required to use ISC's
Stork dashboard project with this production branch of Kea.  You can read more
about it in the release notes below.

The most recent release versions of each branch of Kea can always be found on
the Internet Systems Consortium website's downloads page:

   https://www.isc.org/downloads/#Kea


Michael McNally
ISC Support

-----------------------

# Kea 1.6.3, August 4th 2020, Release Notes

Welcome to Kea 1.6.3, a maintenance release of the 1.6 series. 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 and DNS update servers, an example shell client to connect to
the CA, a daemon that is able to retrieve YANG configuration and updates
from Sysrepo, 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 is stored in a CSV file by default;
it can optionally be stored in a MySQL, PostgreSQL, or Cassandra
database instead. Host reservations can be stored in a configuration
file, or in a MySQL, PostgreSQL, or Cassandra database. They can also be
retrieved from a RADIUS server, although this functionality is somewhat
limited. Kea DHCPv4 and DHCPv6 daemons provide support for YANG models,
which are stored in a Sysrepo datastore and can be configured via the
NETCONF protocol.

Due to popular demand, this maintenance release brings in a new command
and two small improvements. If you are not affected by these issues, no
upgrade is necessary. However, if you wish to deploy the latest stable
Kea version, please upgrade to 1.6.3.

If you are interested in the latest development releases with new
features, please look at the 1.7.x series.

The text below references issue numbers. For more details, visit the Kea
GitLab page at https://gitlab.isc.org/isc-projects/kea/issues.

The following issues were added since 1.6.3:

1. **status-get command and Stork support**. Kea 1.6.3 now supports a
`status-get` command that returns a detailed current status, giving
insight into the current operation of any Kea servers. In particular,
this command is heavily used by Stork, ISC's new dashboard system. With
the addition of that command, it is possible to use Kea 1.6.3 with
Stork. To learn more about Stork, please visit the [Stork project
website](https://gitlab.isc.org/isc-projects/stork) at
https://gitlab.isc.org/isc-projects/stork (#1258).

2. **Alter order of HR and lease lookups**. When processing a packet
request, Kea has to inspect two databases - one with existing leases and
another one with host reservations - to make a determination regarding
the lease to offer. The code has been updated to do the lease lookup
first. This should give a modest to moderate improvement in cases where
lease allocation is significantly faster than reservations, such as when
using memfile for leases and a SQL database for reservations. (#1141)

3. **Client classes and host reservations**. The client classes
specified within host reservations can now be used to influence subnet
selection within a shared network and pool selection within a subnet.
(#1139).

## License
This version of Kea is released under the Mozilla Public License,
version 2.0.

   https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0

The premium and subscriber-only hooks libraries are provided in source
code form, under the terms of an End User License Agreement (you will
get the source code that you can modify freely, but you are not
permitted to redistribute it).

## Download

Pre-built ISC packages for current versions of the most popular Linux
operating systems are available at:

   https://cloudsmith.io/~isc/repos/

The Kea source and PGP signature for this release may be downloaded from:

   https://www.isc.org/download

The signature was generated with the ISC code signing key, which is
available at:

   https://www.isc.org/pgpkey

ISC provides detailed documentation, including installation instructions
and usage tutorials, in the Kea Administrator Reference Manual.
Documentation is included with the installation or via
https://kb.isc.org/docs/kea-administrator-reference-manual in HTML,
plain text, or PDF formats. ISC maintains a public open source code
tree, wiki, issue tracking system, milestone planner, and roadmap at
https://gitlab.isc.org//isc-projects/kea.

Limitations and known issues with this release can be found at
https://gitlab.isc.org/isc-projects/kea/wikis/known-issues-list.

We ask users of this software to please let us know how it worked for
you and what operating system you tested on. Feel free to share your
feedback on the Kea Users mailing list
(https://lists.isc.org/mailman/listinfo/kea-users).  We would also like
to hear whether the documentation is adequate and accurate. Please open
tickets in the Kea GitLab project for bugs, documentation omissions and
errors, and enhancement requests. We want to hear from you even if
everything worked.

## Support

Professional support for Kea is available from ISC. We encourage all
professional users to consider this option; Kea maintenance is funded
with support subscriptions. For more information on ISC's Kea and DHCP
software support see https://www.isc.org/support/.

Free best-effort support is provided by our user community via a mailing
list. Information on all public email lists is available at
https://www.isc.org/community/mailing-list. If you have any comments or
questions about working with Kea, please share them to the Kea Users
list (https://lists.isc.org/mailman/listinfo/kea-users). Bugs and
feature requests may be submitted via GitLab at
https://gitlab.isc.org/isc-projects/kea/issues.

## Changes

The following summarizes changes and important upgrade notes since the
previous release (1.6.2).

1668.	[func]		tmark
	The order of lease and host reservation lookups have been
swapped.
	This may provide a modest to moderate performance boost in cases
	where host reservations are used.
	(Gitlab #1141)

1667.	[func]		marcin
	Implemented status-get command which returns general status
	information about a Kea server status and optionally
	HA specific information if the HA hooks library is present.
	(Gitlab #1258)

1666.	[func]		marcin
	Client classes specified within host reservations can be used
	to influence subnet selection within a shared network and pool
	selection within a subnet.
	(Gitlab #1155)

Thank you again to everyone who assisted us in making this release
possible.

We look forward to receiving your feedback.