[Kea-users] Kea 3.0.1 (Debian) – kea-shell hangs when executing lease4 commands through Control Agent

[Oliver]

Just to add more detail: in my setup kea-shell hangs immediately when I run
it locally on the server, and it never responds unless I interrupt it.

The Control Agent is configured with HTTP basic authentication, and
kea-shell on Debian doesn’t seem to handle this scenario. Stork works fine
with the same authentication, and I can successfully send commands using curl
-u user:password, so the Control Agent API itself is functioning correctly.

Is this the expected behavior? In other words, is it normal that kea-shell
cannot send commands when Control Agent authentication is enabled? Thanks
beforehand.


Cheers...



El vie, 5 dic 2025 a las 12:01, Oliver (<ofabelo at gmail.com>) escribió:

> Hello,
>
> I am using Kea 3.0.1 on Debian with the default Debian packages, and I am
> experiencing an issue where *kea-shell hangs indefinitely* when I try to
> execute any commands that should go through the Control Agent, such as:
>
> lease4-get
> lease4-del
> list-commands
>
> *What triggered this:*
> I needed to delete an active lease because a printer was replaced, and Kea
> was still holding a lease for the old MAC address. When I tried to run:
>
> kea-shell --auth-user ... lease4-del ...
>
> the command never returned. It authenticates successfully, but just hangs
> forever.
>
> *Relevant details:*
>
>    -
>
>    Kea DHCPv4 is working normally.
>    -
>
>    Stork also works normally.
>    -
>
>    Control Agent starts successfully and listens on port 8000.
>    -
>
>    Authentication works (I get 401 if wrong credentials).
>    -
>
>    The DHCPv4 control socket exists at:
>    /var/run/kea/kea4-ctrl-socket
>    -
>
>    In kea-ctrl-agent.conf I have:
>
>    "control-sockets": {
>      "dhcp4": {
>        "socket-type": "unix",
>        "socket-name": "kea4-ctrl-socket"
>      }}
>
>    -
>
>    However, kea-shell hangs as soon as the Control Agent tries to forward
>    the request to DHCPv4. No errors appear, just an indefinite wait.
>
> I also noticed that the Control Agent rejects attempts to use absolute
> paths (e.g., /run/kea/kea4-ctrl-socket) with the error:
> *“invalid path specified, supported path is /etc/kea”*
> so I cannot use explicit absolute socket paths.
>
> *Question:*
> How can I correctly configure the Control Agent in Kea 3.0.1 (Debian
> packaging) so that lease-related commands (lease4-get, lease4-del) work
> through kea-shell without hanging?
> Is there an officially supported way to specify the socket directory/path
> for the DHCPv4 control socket in this version?
>
> Thank you very much.
> Oliver
>
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