[Kea-announce] Kea 1.6.2, a new stable production release of Kea, is now available

Thu Feb 27 00:54:29 UTC 2020

Internet Systems Consortium is pleased to announce the release of Kea 1.6.2.

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 1.6.2 is the latest release in the current stable branch.

Server operators who are currently running the 1.6 stable branch are
advised to upgrade to 1.6.2 if they are using the Config Backend feature,
as Gitlab issue #1110 corrects a potential pitfall for operators using
this feature.

Michael McNally
ISC Support

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

# Kea 1.6.2, February 26th 2020, Release Notes

Welcome to Kea 1.6.2, 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.

This maintenance release brings in two bug fixes for problems that were
considered important enough to warrant a maintenance release. 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 1.6.2.

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 fixed since 1.6.1:

1. **Subnet options are not being loaded from the config database for
all subnets**. Corrected an issue in the MySQL CB hook library which
could, under certain conditions, cause subnet and shared-network
options, properly added to the CB database, to be discarded when fetched
from the backend. (#1110)

2. **Better option 43 handling for Cisco Meraki Routers** Modified
vendor encapsulated option (option 43) parsing to interpret sub-option
codes 0 and 255 as PAD and END when no sub-option with these codes are
defined. This adds control of illegal but common use of these reserved
code points in option 43. One particular hardware type known to work
better with this change are Cisco Meraki routers, but there may be other
hardware that could benefit from this fix. (#1111)

3. **ACK response to DHCPINFORM now contains client supplied ciaddr**.
This small change may improve compatibility with clients that use
DHCPINFORM. (#1112)

4. **Graceful shutdown due to DB failure**. Kea servers now detect and
remove orphaned control channel sockets. This corrects a failure of the
servers to restart with an error of "address already in use" following a
fatal loss of database connectivity. Also, Kea servers now shutdown
gracefully, if connectivity with a backend database has been lost and
retries are either disabled or have been exhausted. Prior to this they
simply invoked exit() which could orphan control socket files or cause
segfaults unloading the CB Cmds hook library. (#1113, #1114).

## 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 (1.6.1).

```
1665.	[bug]		tmark
	Modified option 43 parsing to interpret sub-option codes 0 and
255
	as PAD and END when no sub-option with these codes are defined.
	This adds control of illegal but common use of these reserved
	code points in option 43.
	(Gitlab #1111,#950)

1664.	[bug]		tmark
	Corrected an issue in the MySQL CB hook library which could
	cause subnet and shared-network options, properly added to
	the CB database, to be discarded when fetched from the backend.
	(Gitlab #1110,#1093)

1663.	[func]		tmark
	Client supplied ciaddr is now sent back when responding to
	DHCPINFORM
	(Gitlab #1112,#992)

1662.	[bug]		tmark
	kea-dhcp4 and kea-dhcp6 now shutdown gracefully by executing
	the shutdown command, if connectivity with a backend database
	has been lost and retries are either disabled or have been
	exhausted. Prior to this they simply invoked exit() which
	could orphan control socket files or cause segfaults unloading
	the CB Cmds hook library.
	(Gitlab #1114,#1108)

1661.	[bug]		tmark
	Kea servers now detect and remove orphaned control channel
	sockets.  This corrects a failure of the servers to restart
	with an error of "address already in use" following a fatal
	loss of database connecivity.
	(Gitlab #1113,#1097)
```

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

We look forward to receiving your feedback.