[kea-announce] Kea 2.3.7, a new development release of Kea, is now available

Wed Apr 26 21:55:54 UTC 2023

Internet Systems Consortium is pleased to announce the release of Kea 2.3.7.

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

Kea source tarball are 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/2.3.5/kea-2.3.7.tar.gz

And from the ISC download page:

          https://www.isc.org/download

---

# Kea 2.3.7 Release Notes, April 26th 2023

Welcome to Kea 2.3.7, the eighth 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 features and bug fixes have been implemented since the 
previous release, version 2.3.6:

1. **Free Leases Queue allocator**: The FLQ is a new allocation 
strategy. When selected, Kea generates a list of all possible leases on 
startup and keeps it in memory. This allocator is suitable when DHCP 
servers work with nearly depleted pools, and the time to find an 
available lease via other allocators becomes too long. This new 
allocator, however, slows down the server startup and reconfiguration, 
and it also uses more memory, so users may wish to experiment with it in 
their specific configuration. It can be used for address assignment in 
DHCPv4 and prefix delegation in DHCPv6. This feature has been only 
lightly tested, and thus is considered experimental [#2780].
2. **Allocator configuration in CB**: With the introduction of FLQ, Kea 
now supports three allocation strategies: iterative, random, and FLQ. 
These can now be configured via the Configuration Backend [#2823].
3. **New API command: reservation-update**: A new command has been added 
that allows an existing host reservation to be updated. It is 
implemented as part of the Host Commands premium hook [#549].
4. **Bulk Leasequery (BLQ)**: It is now possible to query for an IPv6 
prefix by specifying an IPv6 address that belongs to that prefix [#2715, 
#1275]. We have implemented BLQ methods for MySQL and PostgreSQL 
[#2753]. The database schema has been updated for new BLQ columns 
[#2752]. All these changes are featured in the Leasequery hook, which is 
available only to ISC support subscribers.
5. **Build improvements**: Hammer, our optional building tool, has 
updated pgsql package handling for RHEL9 [#2836]. Hammer now correctly 
handles ddeb packages when uploading to Cloudsmith [#2814].
6. **Multi-threading**: Multi-threading is now enabled by default for 
High Availability (HA) mode [#2749].
7. **Bug fixes**: The remote ID sub-option of the Relay Agent option is 
now parsed correctly if its value ends with one or more zeros [#2794]. 
We have fixed a bug in the HA hook library whereby the HA service could 
sometimes terminate even after the partner's clock was corrected. The 
last clock skew is now ignored when a communication failure occurs with 
the partner [#2754].
8. **Documentation**: Editing and updates to the Kea Administrator 
Reference Manual (ARM) [#2804]. 

## 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 a 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 for core 
Kea since the previous release, version 2.3.6:

2127.	[build]		razvan
	The library version numbers have been bumped up for the Kea 2.3.7
	development release.
	(Gitlab #2837)

2126.	[func]		andrei
	A new command named reservation-update is now available in the
	host_cmds hook library. It updates an existing reservation.
	(Gitlab #549)

2125.	[func]		marcin
	Allocators can now be configured in the configuration backend.
	(Gitlab #2823)

2124.	[perf]		andrei
	When not explicitly configured, multi-threading mode and the HTTP
	dedicated listener are enabled by default for the
	high-availability hook library ("enable-multi-threading" and
	"http-dedicated-listener" set to true).
	(Gitlab #2749)

2123.	[bug]		razvan
	Fixed a bug which was truncating relay suboptions (circuit-id
	code 1 and remote-id code 2) if the data ended in 0x0. The
	option definitions have been updated from OPT_STRING_TYPE to
	OPT_BINARY_TYPE.
	(Gitlab #2794)

2122.	[bug]		marcin
	Fixed a bug in the HA hook library whereby the HA service could
	sometimes terminate even after the partner's clock has been
	corrected. The last clock skew is now ignored when a
	communication failure with the partner occurs.
	(Gitlab #2754)

2121.	[func]		marcin
	Implemented Free Lease Queue allocator. It can be used for
	address assignment in DHCPv4 and prefix delegation in DHCPv6.
	The allocator is suitable when the DHCP servers work with
	nearly depleted pools, and the time to find an available
	lease becomes long with other allocators. The new allocator,
	however, slows down the server startup and reconfiguration.
	It also uses more memory.
	(Gitlab #2780, #2764)

And for Kea premium:

168.	[bug]		tmark
	The lease query hook library can now find a delegated prefix
	that contains an DHCPv6 IP address in response to a query by
	IP address.
	(Gitlab #1275)

167.	[func]		andrei
	A new command named reservation-update is now available in the
	host_cmds hook library. It updates an existing reservation.
	(Gitlab #549)

166.	[func]		marcin
	The subnet_cmds hook has been updated to support using the Free
	Lease Queue (FLQ) allocator. This allocator can be selected at
	the subnet or shared network level using the commands from this
	hook library.
	(Gitlab #2780)

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.