Kea is an open-source

DHCP The Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) is a network management protocol used on Internet Protocol (IP) networks for automatically assigning IP addresses and other communication parameters to devices connected to the network using a clie ...

server developed by the

Internet Systems Consortium Internet Systems Consortium, Inc., also known as ISC, is an American non-profit corporation that supports the infrastructure of the universal, self-organizing Internet by developing and maintaining core production-quality software, protocols, and ...

, authors of ISC DHCP, also known as DHCPd. Kea and ISC DHCP are both implementations of the

Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol The Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) is a network protocol, network management protocol used on Internet Protocol (IP) networks for automatically assigning IP addresses and other communication parameters to devices connected to the netw ...

, a set of standards established by the

Internet Engineering Task Force The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a standards organization for the Internet standard, Internet and is responsible for the technical standards that make up the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP). It has no formal membership roster ...

(IETF). Kea software is distributed in source code form on GitHub, from various ISC sites, and through a number of operating system packages. Kea is licensed under the

Mozilla Public License The Mozilla Public License (MPL) is a free and open-source weak copyleft license for most Mozilla Foundation software such as Firefox and Thunderbird. The MPL is developed and maintained by Mozilla, which seeks to balance the concerns of bo ...

2.0. The Kea distribution includes a DHCPv4 server, a

DHCPv6 The Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol version 6 (DHCPv6) is a network protocol for configuring Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) hosts with IP addresses, IP prefixes, default route, local segment MTU, and other configuration data required to ...

server, and a

Dynamic DNS Dynamic DNS (DDNS) is a method of automatically updating a name server in the Domain Name System (DNS), often in real time, with the active DDNS configuration of its configured hostnames, addresses or other information. The term is used to desc ...

(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 In computing, the Preboot eXecution Environment (PXE; often pronounced as ''pixie''), often called PXE boot (''pixie boot''), is a specification describing a standardized client–server environment that boots a software assembly, retrieved ...

(PXE) boot, client classification, shared networks, and high-availability (failover pairs). Kea can store leases locally in a memfile, or in a

PostgreSQL PostgreSQL ( ) also known as Postgres, is a free and open-source software, free and open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) emphasizing extensibility and SQL compliance. PostgreSQL features transaction processing, transactions ...

MySQL MySQL () is an Open-source software, open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A rel ...

database. Kea has a supported API for writing optional extensions, using 'hooks'. Kea has a graphical management application, calle
Stork
that integrates an agent running on the Kea server, an exporter to a Prometheus time-series data store, a

Grafana Grafana is a multi-platform open source analytics and interactive visualization web application. It can produce charts, graphs, and alerts for the web when connected to supported data sources. There is also a licensed Grafana Enterprise version ...

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

External links

* {{Official
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
Unix network-related software Servers (computing) Free network-related software