[kea-announce] Kea 2.5.6 is available now

Tue Feb 27 19:22:39 UTC 2024

Internet Systems Consortium is pleased to announce the release of Kea 2.5.6.

The current stable branch of Kea is Kea 2.4 and its most recent release is 2.4.1.
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.

Kea source tarballs and packages are available from cloudsmith.io:

https://cloudsmith.io/~isc/repos/kea-2-5/packages/

And from the ISC download page:  https://www.isc.org/download/#Kea

Also note that we have recently introduced an experimental Docker image.
Kea Dockers are available in a separate repository on Cloudsmith: https://cloudsmith.io/~isc/repos/docker/packages/
Regards,
Vicky Risk, Product Manager
——————
# Kea 2.5.6 Release Notes, February 28, 2024

Welcome to Kea 2.5.6, the seventh 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. For 
details about Docker issues, visit the page at 
https://gitlab.isc.org/isc-projects/kea-docker/-/issues/. For details 
about packaging, visit the page at 
https://gitlab.isc.org/isc-projects/kea-packaging/-/issues/.

The following bug fixes and features have been implemented since the 
previous release, version 2.5.5:

1. **DNR options**: The implementation of the Discovery of 
Network-designated Resolvers (DNR) option has been changed to respect 
the encoding of service parameters updated in RFC9463, RFC9461, and 
RFC9460. To facilitate the configuration of these service parameters, a 
convenient notation was introduced [#3141].
2. **Database improvements**: The database schema is now initialized on 
startup if the configured database is empty [#3025].
3. **perfmon hook library**: Building blocks have been placed for a new 
open source hook library, libdhcp_perfmon.so, meant to track server 
performance and report on performance-impacting events [#3230, #3231, 
#3242, #3245].
4. **RADIUS**: RADIUS packets are now sent asynchronously, allowing 
other DHCP packets to be processed until a RADIUS response is received 
[#2022]. The RADIUS hook library, libdhcp_radius.so, is still 
single-threaded at this time.
5. **Code maintenance**: An iterator is now properly checked in perfdhcp 
[#3185]. A potential use-after-free on server exit was fixed when Botan 
is used [#3193].

## Incompatible Changes

None.

## Other

We are initiating a clean-up of older repositories on Cloudsmith. The 
repositories hosting development branches 1.9 and 2.1 will be 
decommissioned on February 29, 2024. The repository for the 2.3 releases 
is scheduled for removal on March 29, 2024. Moreover, the repository for 
the 2.5 releases will be phased out following the public availability of 
the stable 2.6.0 release.

Additionally, beginning with the 2.7.X release series, we will be 
launching a new repository on Cloudsmith, named kea-dev, which will host 
the 2.7.X release alongside all future development releases.

Repositories for stable releases will remain unaffected.

Should you require packages from the 1.9, 2.1, or 2.3 releases, we 
strongly recommend creating a backup copy.

It's possible to use the wget tool to download specific packages, e.g: 
wget 
https://dl.cloudsmith.io/public/isc/kea-2-1/deb/debian/pool/stretch/main/
p/py/python3-isc-kea-connector_2.1.7-isc20220627172414/python3-isc-kea-co
nnector_2.1.7-isc20220627172414_all.deb

Or use a package manager: `apt-get download <package-name>`; `dnf 
download <package-name>`;

The source code for each release can always be accessed and will 
continue to be available on our downloads site at 
https://downloads.isc.org/isc/kea/.

## 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](https://www.isc.org/kea-premium-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/

Pre-built Docker images as well as Docker files are available. For 
details, see:

https://gitlab.isc.org/isc-projects/kea-docker

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 2.5.5 
release.

2208.	[build]		razvan
	The library version numbers have been bumped up for the Kea 2.5.6
	development release.
	(Gitlab #3261)

2207.	[func]		piotrek
	Kea now supports DNR options as specified in RFC9463,
	RFC9461, RFC9460. The option may be configured using
	convenient notation, where Kea takes care of complex
	option encoding to be inline with RFCs.
	(Gitlab #3141)

2206.	[func]		andrei
	DHCP servers now initialize the database schema automatically on
	startup or on reconfiguration if there is at least one database
	backend configured and if the configured database is empty.
	(Gitlab #3025)

2205.	[func]		tmark
	Perfmon hook library now dumps the packet event stack
	of query packets to debug logging after they have been
	processed.
	(Gitlab #3231)

2204.	[func]		tmark
	The skeleton of a new open source hook library,
	libdhcp_perfmon.so, has been added.  The library is
	still in development and does not yet provide any functionality.
	(Gitlab #3242)

And for Kea premium:

192.	[doc]		fdupont, andrei
	Radius access exchange is now performed asynchronously.
	(Gitlab #2022)

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

We look forward to receiving your feedback.
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