Planning for Kea 1.4

Since we posted Kea 1.3, the team has been hard at work on plans for Kea 1.4.

High Availability

We want to address the need for high availability for DHCP services. ISC DHCP supports DHCPv4 failover, but this is a complicated and fragile protocol, and we are hoping to avoid implementing it in Kea. A number of Kea users have reported on the kea-users mailing list that they have managed to build HA Kea systems using a shared database backend but there is no way, currently, to have a HA system with the higher-performance memfile system.

We wrote up a design plan for HA support for Kea that included load balancing between systems using the memfile option.

RADIUS Integration

We have heard from some ISPs that they need RADIUS integration to provide client access control, option provisioning, as well as accounting. One ISP also needs to specify classes of service (in terms of contention for wifi addresses). A significant challenge here is how to minimize the communications with the RADIUS system, particularly for lease renewals. This is being considered as a possible premium hook for Kea. We had a design proposal for RADIUS integration.

We welcome feedback on these proposed designs for Kea 1.4 on the kea-dev mailing list at kea-dev@lists.isc.org.

Recent Posts

What's New from ISC

Changes to ISC Software Signing

At the end of 2022, we are introducing some changes to the tools and procedures we use for signing the source code releases of our software, to make the whole process simpler and more robust.

Read post
Previous post: BIND 9.12 Almost Ready