[kea-announce] Kea 2.5.1, a new development release of Kea, is now available

Wed Aug 30 12:17:57 UTC 2023

Internet Systems Consortium is pleased to announce the release of Kea 2.5.1.

Releases in the Kea 2.5.x sequence are part of the Kea 2.5 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 2.4 and its most recent release
is 2.4.0

Kea source tarball are available from cloudsmith.io:

https://dl.cloudsmith.io/public/isc/kea-2-4/raw/versions/2.4.0/kea-2.4.0.tar.gz

https://dl.cloudsmith.io/public/isc/kea-2-5/raw/versions/2.5.1/kea-2.5.1.tar.gz

And from the ISC download page:

          https://www.isc.org/download

---

# Kea 2.5.1 Release Notes, August 30, 2023

Welcome to Kea 2.5.1, the second monthly release of the 2.5 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 update and a REST 
API; optional database support (MySQL and PostgreSQL); optional RADIUS, 
Kerberos, YANG/NETCONF, and GSS-TSIG support; and much more. Kea 
provides extensive management capabilities, including but not limited 
to: TLS support, Role-Based Access Control, run-time configuration 
monitoring and updates via a REST API, host reservations, and client 
classification.

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 2.4.0:

1. **Ping-check design**: One of the few ISC DHCP features that are 
still not available in Kea is ping-check. This ability to attempt 
detection of duplicated addresses by sending an ICMP Echo (ping) message 
before offering an IPv4 address is currently in the design phase. We now 
have a design and a skeleton hook implementation that is being reviewed. 
Interested users are invited to share their comments in the tickets or 
on the kea-dev mailing list 
(https://lists.isc.org/mailman/listinfo/kea-dev) [#3008, #3012].

2. **RADIUS refactoring design**: Existing Kea support for RADIUS is 
lacking in several areas: it is based on a patched version of 
FreeRADIUS-client, which is difficult to install and maintain; it's also 
not multi-threading-capable and the nature of its code makes it almost 
impossible to adapt for parallel operations. Therefore, we have begun to 
substantially refactor Kea's RADIUS hook to no longer use 
FreeRADIUS-client. This is a complex effort that will take multiple 
releases before reaching a usable stage. So far, we are in the 
refactoring design phase [#3027].

3. **Subnet4-update extended**: The `subnet4-update` command, part of 
the subscriber-only hook library `subnet_cmds`, has been extended 
slightly and now logs information about the subnet being updated [#2982].

4. **Consistency update**: Kea has hundreds of configuration parameters; 
the overwhelming majority of them use dashes (`-`) as separators. 
However, only one, `output_options`, used an underscore (`_`). This was 
confusing and some users reported this as an annoyance. Starting with 
this release, Kea uses the dashed version (`output-options`), while 
still honoring the deprecated version (`output_options`) [#2904, #3003].

5. **Usability improvements**: The client-id is now included in the 
EVAL_RESULT message [#2854]. We clarified some documentation examples, 
so they no longer refer to the non-existent agent commands hook [#3001]. 
The DHCP4_CLASS_ASSIGNED log message now works properly with shared 
networks [#2908].

6. **Documentation updates**: Subnet selection by specifying an 
interface for a subnet is now documented [#2968]. A small correction to 
the documentation of the `-D` option of perfdhcp has been fixed [#2995]. 
A new diagram explaining how Kea recognizes whether a client is the same 
as a previous one was added [#2908].

7. **Build improvements**: A problem with header inclusions has been 
fixed; the code now builds properly on OpenBSD [#2970]. A warning about 
array-bounds warnings on Ubuntu and possibly other distributions has 
been fixed [#2821]. The IOSignalTest.mixedSignals test has been improved 
and no longer fails on an Ubuntu 22.04 VM [#2954].

## Incompatible Changes

1. `output_options` has been deprecated and replaced by 
`output-options`; this option is used in the Kea logging configuration. 
The deprecated version (using an underscore) is still accepted. For 
details, see item 4 above.

## License

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

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

Some Kea hook libraries are provided under the MPL 2.0; others are 
licensed with the Kea Hooks Basic Commercial End User License. The 
source for each hook library includes the applicable license.

## 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 at 
https://kea.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html in HTML, PDF, or EPUB 
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 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 upgrades since the 2.5.0 
release.

2174.	[func]		fdupont
	Added a new information message which displays the
	client and the transaction identification information
	for received queries between message unpacking and
	first classification.
	(Gitlab #2854)

2173.	[bug]		tmark
	Fixed a sporadic failure of IOSignaltest.mixedSignals
	unit test.  Test no longer relies on signals arriving
	in order they are sent as it cannot be guaranteed.
	(Gitlab #2954)

2172.	[func]		fdupont
	Completed and improved logs showing what client classes
	are assigned to queries during processing.
	(Gitlab #2908)

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

We look forward to receiving your feedback.