[kea-announce] Kea 2.3.0, a new development release of Kea, is now available

Wed Aug 31 14:41:44 UTC 2022

Internet Systems Consortium is pleased to announce the release of Kea 2.3.0.

Releases in the Kea 2.3.x sequence are part of the Kea 2.3 development 
branch, where new features are provided for testing and evaluation 
before the branch is designated stable and recommended for production use.

The current stable branch of Kea is Kea 2.2 and its most recent release
is 2.2.0

Starting with this release, the Kea source tarball will be available 
from cloudsmith.io:

	https://dl.cloudsmith.io/public/isc/kea-2-2/raw/versions/2.2.0/kea-2.2.0.tar.gz

	https://dl.cloudsmith.io/public/isc/kea-2-3/raw/versions/2.3.0/kea-2.3.0.tar.gz

And from the ISC download page:

	https://www.isc.org/download

---

# Kea 2.3.0, August 31 2022, Release Notes

Welcome to Kea 2.3.0, the first monthly release of the 2.3 development
series. As with any other development release, use this with caution:
development releases are not recommended for production use.

Kea is a DHCP implementation developed by Internet Systems Consortium
(ISC) that features DHCPv4 and DHCPv6 servers with DNS updating and a
REST API; optional database support (MySQL and PostgreSQL); optional
RADIUS, Kerberos, and YANG/NETCONF support; and much more. Kea provides
extensive management capabilities, including but not limited to: TLS
support, run-time configuration monitoring and updates via a REST API,
host reservations, client classification, and more.

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 bugfixes and features have been implemented since the
previous release, version 2.2.0:

1. **Broadcast MAC address in DHCPv4 reply**: If the broadcast flag is
set in the DHCPREPLY, the MAC address is also set to the broadcast value
[#2211, #2542].
2. **Multiple v6 vendor options**: Support has been added for multiple
instances of the DHCPv6 vendor-class (code 16) and vendor-opts (code 17)
options. Kea now supports specifying multiple options with different
enterprise numbers; however, this feature has only been lightly tested
so it is considered experimental [#2517].
3. **Logger inheritance**: If using multiple loggers that have a
relationship, e.g. `kea-dhcp4` and `kea-dhcp4.packets`, the omitted
logger configuration entries in the child are now properly inherited
from the root logger, as stated in the ARM [#2537].
4. **RBAC**: The ARM section about RBAC has been expanded and extra
examples were added [#2450].
5. **REST API**: The `reservation-get` and `reservation-get-all` API
commands now return the `subnet-id` field [#2471].
6. **Bulk Leasequery**: We have started to implement Bulk Leasequery; it
will take several months to complete. In this release, support for new
options defined in RFC 6926 has been added; however, the logic to use
those options is not yet implemented [#2527].
7. **Documentation**: A template for using High Availability (HA) with
multi-threading (MT) and some other nice features, such as TLS security,
has been added [#2441], and two DHCPv6 examples were corrected. Thanks
to Kevin Fleming for reporting and providing a patch [#2494]. The Sphinx
generator has been corrected, so the Kea ARM no longer uses smart
quotes. Effectively, this allows copying many examples as they are
without the need to change the quote characters [#2513].
8. **Build improvements**: `make distcheck` now uses all major enabled
features specified during the configure phase [#2071, #2511]; the Hammer
tool now exports the FreeRADIUS client packages used while building
packages [#2510]; the `bump_lib_version` script has been updated
[#2528]; and Hammer now sets up the environment and builds Kea properly
on FreeBSD 13.0, and should be able to support any future Python updates
[#2534]. Hammer was updated to build Kea on CentOS 9 Stream [#2516].
Packages for Alpine 3.16 are now building properly and unit tests pass
[#2503].
9. **Performance**: A more performant data structure was implemented for
faster relay lookup. This should improve performance slightly in cases
where relay-based data is used for subnet selection [#2401].
10. **Hooks**: Hook libraries are no longer loaded by an incorrect
daemon. Mistakes where DHCP-specific hooks were loaded by Control Agent
should be a thing of the past [#2235].
11. **Testing**: A `wipe_data.sh` script was corrected. It no longer
refers to a nonexistent path [#2541].

## Notable Changes

* Kea will now set a broadcast MAC address when sending back responses
set with the broadcast flag on. This in general should not cause any
problems and, in fact, should improve compatibility with various devices.
* Several API commands (`reservation-get`, `reservation-get-all`) now
include the `subnet-id` field in the responses. See #2471.

## 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 hook libraries are provided under the
terms of an
Kea Hooks Basic Commercial End User License Agreement.

## 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, as well as from the Cloudsmith repository.

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 at
https://kea.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html.

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.

## Changes

The following summarizes changes and important upgrade notes since the
2.2.0 release for Kea core:

2054.	[build]         razvan
	The library version numbers have been bumped for the Kea 2.3.0
	development release.
	(Gitlab #2546)

2053.	[doc]		razvan
	A new appendix for configuration templates added to Kea ARM.
	which include High Availability with multi-threading and secure
	connections using TLS.
	(Gitlab #2441)

2052.	[func]		andrei
	Omitted logger configuration entries are now properly inherited
	from the root logger as the ARM suggests.
	(Gitlab #2537)

2051.	[func]		razvan
	Added support for bulk lease query options defined in RFC 6926.
	The bulk lease query functionality has not been implemented yet.
	(Gitlab #2527)

2050.	[build]		andrei, tomek
	Fixed problem with preparing system using hammer on FreeBSD
	13.0. The available sphinx and python versions are now detected
	dynamically. This should prevent future package upgrades (e.g.
	to python 3.10) from breaking our builds again.
	(Gitlab #2534)

2049.	[build]		razvan, fdupont
	The distcheck rule is able to compile and run unittests for
	database backends, GSS-TSIG and Sysrepo/NETCONF.
	(Gitlab #2071)

2048.	[bug]		fdupont
	Set broadcast MAC destination address in DHCPv4 replies
	when the IP address is broadcast. Thanks to Joost Bekkers
	for reporting the issue and contributing the patch.  This
	improves Kea's compatibility with Cisco Small Business
	switches.
	(Gitlab #2211)

2047.	[func]		fdupont
	Added support of multiple instances of the DHCPv6
	"vendor-class" (code 16) and "vendor-opts" (code 17)
	options: specifying multiple options with different
	enterprise numbers is now supported by Kea.

2046.	[doc]		andrei
	Disabled smart quotes in Sphinx configuration to leave quotes
	unchanged. Prior to this change, quotes were converted into
	left-quotes and right-quotes. This made it difficult for users to
	copy and use chunks of configuration directly from the ARM.
	(Gitlab #2513)

And for Kea premium:

155.	[bug]		fdupont
	A subnet-id is returned in response to the
	reservation-get and reservation-get-all commands.
	(Gitlab #2471)

See https://gitlab.isc.org/isc-projects/kea/-/wikis/Release-Notes for a
complete list of release notes.

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

We look forward to receiving your feedback.

-- 
Everett B. Fulton
ISC Support