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 cli ...

server developed by the

Internet Systems Consortium Internet Systems Consortium, Inc., also known as ISC, is a Delaware-registered, 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation that supports the infrastructure of the universal, self-organizing Internet by developing and maintaining core production-quality so ...

, authors of ISC DHCP, also known as

DHCPd dhcpd (an abbreviation for "DHCP daemon") is a DHCP server program that operates as a daemon on a server to provide Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) service to a network. This implementation, also known as ISC DHCP, is one of the first a ...

. Kea and ISC DHCP are both implementations of the

Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol 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 cli ...

, a set of standards established by the

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

(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 license is developed and maintained by Mozilla, which seeks to balance the conce ...

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 ...

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 (most often pronounced as ''pixie'', often called PXE Boot/''pixie boot''.) specification describes a standardized client–server environment that boots a software assembly, retrieved from ...

(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 relational database management system (RDBMS) emphasizing extensibility and SQL compliance. It was originally named POSTGRES, referring to its origins as a successor to the In ...

MySQL MySQL () is an 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 relational database ...

, or Cassandra 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 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 is a very new project 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