# Kea 1.6.3, July 30th 2020, Release Notes Welcome to Kea 1.6.3, a maintenance release of the 1.6 series. Kea is a DHCP implementation developed by Internet Systems Consortium, Inc. that features fully functional DHCPv4 and DHCPv6 servers, a dynamic DNS update daemon, a Control Agent (CA) that provides a REST API to control the DHCP and DNS update servers, an example shell client to connect to the CA, a daemon that is able to retrieve YANG configuration and updates from Sysrepo, and a DHCP performance-measurement tool. Both DHCP servers fully support server discovery, address assignment, renewal, rebinding, release, decline, information request, DNS updates, client classification, and host reservations. The DHCPv6 server also supports prefix delegation. Lease information is stored in a CSV file by default; it can optionally be stored in a MySQL, PostgreSQL, or Cassandra database instead. Host reservations can be stored in a configuration file, or in a MySQL, PostgreSQL, or Cassandra database. They can also be retrieved from a RADIUS server, although this functionality is somewhat limited. Kea DHCPv4 and DHCPv6 daemons provide support for YANG models, which are stored in a Sysrepo datastore and can be configured via the NETCONF protocol. Due to popular demand, this maintenance release brings in a new command and two small improvements. If you are not affected by these issues, no upgrade is necessary. However, if you wish to deploy the latest stable Kea version, please upgrade to 1.6.3. If you are interested in the latest development releases with new features, please look at the 1.7.x series. 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 issues were added since 1.6.3: 1. **status-get command and Stork support**. Kea 1.6.3 now supports a `status-get` command that returns a detailed current status, giving insight into the current operation of any Kea servers. In particular, this command is heavily used by Stork, ISC's new dashboard system. With the addition of that command, it is possible to use Kea 1.6.3 with Stork. To learn more about Stork, please visit the [Stork project website](https://gitlab.isc.org/isc-projects/stork) at https://gitlab.isc.org/isc-projects/stork (#1258). 2. **Alter order of HR and lease lookups**. When processing a packet request, Kea has to inspect two databases - one with existing leases and another one with host reservations - to make a determination regarding the lease to offer. The code has been updated to do the lease lookup first. This should give a modest to moderate improvement in cases where lease allocation is significantly faster than reservations, such as when using memfile for leases and a SQL database for reservations. (#1141) 3. **Client classes and host reservations**. The client classes specified within host reservations can now be used to influence subnet selection within a shared network and pool selection within a subnet. (#1139). ## 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 hooks libraries are provided in source code form, under the terms of an End User License Agreement (you will get the source code that you can modify freely, but you are not permitted to redistribute it). ## 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 via https://kb.isc.org/docs/kea-administrator-reference-manual in HTML, plain text, or PDF 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 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. 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 upgrade notes since the previous release (1.6.2). 1668. [func] tmark The order of lease and host reservation lookups have been swapped. This may provide a modest to moderate performance boost in cases where host reservations are used. (Gitlab #1141) 1667. [func] marcin Implemented status-get command which returns general status information about a Kea server status and optionally HA specific information if the HA hooks library is present. (Gitlab #1258) 1666. [func] marcin Client classes specified within host reservations can be used to influence subnet selection within a shared network and pool selection within a subnet. (Gitlab #1155) Thank you again to everyone who assisted us in making this release possible. We look forward to receiving your feedback.