%version; ]> Kea is the next generation of DHCP software developed by ISC. It supports both DHCPv4 and DHCPv6 protocols along with their extensions, e.g. prefix delegation and dynamic updates to DNS. Kea was initially developed as a part of the BIND 10 framework (). In early 2014, ISC made the decision to discontinue active development of BIND 10 and continue development of Kea as standalone DHCP software. This guide covers Kea version &__VERSION__;.

Kea is officially supported on RedHat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, Fedora and FreeBSD systems. It is also likely to work on many other platforms: builds have been tested on (in no particular order) Debian GNU/Linux 6 and unstable, Ubuntu 9.10, NetBSD 5, Solaris 10 and 11, FreeBSD 7 and 8, CentOS Linux 5.3, MacOS 10.6 and 10.7, and OpenBSD 5.1. Non supported systems (especially non-Linux) are likely to have issues with directly connected DHCPv4 clients. There are currently no plans to port Kea to Windows platforms.

Running Kea uses various extra software which may not be provided in the default installation of some operating systems, nor in the standard package collections. You may need to install this required software separately. (For the build requirements, also see .) Kea supports two crypto libraries: Botan and OpenSSL. Only one of them is required to be installed during compilation. Kea uses the Botan crypto library for C++ (), version 1.8 or later. As an alternative to Botan, Kea can use the OpenSSL crypto library (). It requires a version with SHA-2 support. Kea uses the log4cplus C++ logging library (). It requires at least log4cplus version 1.0.3. In order to store lease information in a MySQL database, Kea requires MySQL headers and libraries. This is an optional dependency in that Kea can be built without MySQL support. In order to store lease information in a PostgreSQL database, Kea requires PostgreSQL headers and libraries. This is an optional dependency in that Kea can be built without PostgreSQL support.

Kea is modular. Part of this modularity is accomplished using multiple cooperating processes which, together, provide the server functionality. The following software is included with Kea: keactrl — Tool to start, stop, reconfigure, and report status for the Kea servers. kea-dhcp4 — DHCPv4 server process. This process responds to DHCPv4 queries from clients. kea-dhcp6 — DHCPv6 server process. This process responds to DHCPv6 queries from clients. kea-dhcp-ddns — DHCP-DDNS process. This process acts as an intermediary between the DHCP servers and DNS server. It receives name update requests from the DHCP servers and sends DNS Update messages to the DNS servers. kea-admin — A tool useful for database backend maintenance (creating new database, checking versions, upgrading etc.) kea-lfc — This process removes redundant information from the files used to provide persistent storage for the memfile data base backend. The service is written to run as a stand alone process. While it can be started externally it should be started by the Kea DHCP servers. perfdhcp — DHCP benchmarking tool which simulates multiple clients to test both DHCPv4 and DHCPv6 servers performance.

The tools and modules are covered in full detail in this guide. In addition, manual pages are also provided in the default installation. Kea also provides C++ libraries and programmer interfaces for DHCP. These include detailed developer documentation and code examples.