Kea (software)

ISC KeaOriginal author(s)| Tomek Mrugalski and Marcin Siodelski

|

Developer(s)| Internet Systems Consortium
Initial release| 2014; 11 years ago (2014)
Stable release|

2.6.2[1] / 26 March 2025; 0 days ago (26 March 2025)

Preview release|

2.7.7[2] / 26 March 2025; 0 days ago (26 March 2025)

Repository| gitlab.isc.org/isc-projects/kea
Written in| C++
Operating system| BSD, Linux, macOS
Type| DHCP server
License| MPL 2.0
Website| www.isc.org/kea/

Kea is an open-source DHCP server developed by the Internet Systems Consortium, authors of ISC DHCP, also known as DHCPd. Kea and ISC DHCP are both implementations of the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol, a set of standards established by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Kea software is distributed in source code form on GitHub,[3] from various ISC sites, and through a number of operating system packages.[4][5][6][7][8] Kea is licensed under the Mozilla Public License 2.0.[9]

The Kea distribution includes a DHCPv4 server, a DHCPv6 server, and a Dynamic DNS (DDNS) server. Significant features include: support for IPv6 prefix delegation, host reservations (which may be optionally stored in a separate back end database), Preboot Execution Environment (PXE) boot, client classification, shared networks, and high-availability (failover pairs). Kea can store leases locally in a memfile, or in a PostgreSQL or MySQL database.[10][11] Kea has a supported API for writing optional extensions, using 'hooks'.[12]

Kea has a graphical management application, called Stork, that integrates an agent running on the Kea server, an exporter to a Prometheus time-series data store, a Grafana template for data visualization, and the Stork web dashboard. Like Kea, Stork is licensed under the MPL 2.0 license. The Stork dashboard provides a simple graphical display for managing one or many Kea servers. Current features include server status, pool utilization, high-availability status, host reservations, and leases per second. Via the integration with Grafana it also provides detailed statistics on DHCP messages over time. Stork was first released in 2014, and features are being added rapidly in monthly releases.

## References

[edit]

1. ^ "Kea 2.6.2 Release Notes".
2. ^ "Kea 2.7.7 Release Notes".
3. ^ "Kea project page on Github". github.com. GitHub Inc. Retrieved 4 November 2016.
4. ^ "Fedora Project git". fedoraproject.org. Fedora Project. Archived from the original on 8 November 2016. Retrieved 4 November 2016.
5. ^ "FreshPorts". freshports.org. Retrieved 4 November 2016.
6. ^ "Ubuntu packages". ubuntu.com. Canonical, LTD. Archived from the original on 8 November 2016. Retrieved 4 November 2016.
7. ^ "Debian Packages". debian.org. SPI, Inc. Retrieved 4 November 2016.
8. ^ "Arch Linux Packages". archlinux.org. Judd Vinet and Aaron Griffin. Archived from the original on 9 August 2017. Retrieved 8 August 2017.
9. ^ "Kea to be released under Mozilla Public License 2.0". 8 December 2015.
10. ^ "DHCP Infrastructure Evolution at Facebook and the Importance of Designing Stateless Services". SREcon15 Europe. USENIX. Retrieved 4 November 2016.
11. ^ "Using ISC Kea DHCP in our data centers". f code. Facebook. 21 July 2015. Retrieved 4 November 2016.
12. ^ "Kea Development". Internet Systems Consortium, Inc. Archived from the original on 13 November 2016. Retrieved 4 November 2016.

## External links

[edit]

* Official website
* Project repository and issue tracker
* Project repository and issue tracker for Stork management dashboard.
* Kea documentation on ReadTheDocs
* Stork documentation on ReadTheDocs
* ISC Kea packages