Kea 3.0, our first LTS version
20 comments
·June 26, 2025throw0101c
JdeBP
Has been. It was done two and a bit years ago, and the change has even reached Debian now. (-:
latchkey
I have a positive ending Kea story. We deployed 20,000 PS5 APUs (AKA: AsRock BC-250) each is a individual blade computer that was PXE booted.
We started to see strange behavior on the network and it took a bit of trial and error to figure out what was going wrong. Eventually, we traced it down to dnsmasq being unable to keep up with all the DHCP UDP traffic regardless of how we tuned the kernel/networking buffers.
Switched to Kea and all of our problems magically went away.
kaladin-jasnah
Wow, I didn't know the BC250s were used at such scale. I bought two to play with for dirt cheap, but haven't gotten around to it yet.
Are they primarily used for mining?
kayson
I wonder when this will make it into pfsense... The transition to kea has been a bit of a mess with tons of bugs. Thankfully it's controlled by an option, and it seems like 2.8.0 knocked out quite a few of them
v5v3
Is opnsense ahead for this then? Or same
mortos
I don't follow pfsense too much but my understanding is OPNsense typically brings in package updates faster as they have a more frequent update cycle. I can't speak too much to bugs as I haven't migrated to Kea but imo some core functionality wasn't there until recently. And Dnsmasq seems like a better fit for me anyway, which is where I'll migrate to.
From the 25.1.6 OPNsense May update notes:
> Last but not least: Kea DHCPv6 is here. And with it full DHCP and router advertisement support in Dnsmasq to bridge the gap for ISC users who do not need or want Kea. We are going to make Dnsmasq DHCP the default in new installations starting with 25.7, too. ISC DHCP will still be around as a core component in 25.7 but likely moves to plugins for 26.1 next year.
seany
I've been using it on opnsense since the first version it was released in. I aggressively switched because wanted to ditch my weird setup to do multi subnets (forwarding though a l3 switch). Haven't had any issues.
dgfitz
I’ll google it in a moment, but skimming those notes, I have no idea what Kea is.
CBLT
The submitted link might be better changed to the actual release notes: https://gitlab.isc.org/isc-projects/kea/-/wikis/Release-Note... which start with this information.
a_e_k
I was wondering that too. A DHCP server, apparently: https://www.isc.org/kea/
(This is one place where I think a little editorializing to the page title to add context would be helpful.)
gertrunde
As others have said, Kea is a DHCP server.
More than that, it is an ISC project, is the successor to ISC DHCP (now end-of-life & unsupported for a few years), and weirdly started out as part of BIND 10.
Ref: https://www.isc.org/dhcphistory/#the-kea-dhcp-server
(And I vaguely recall it's used as the DHCP component in a few other things, like maybe Infoblox).
digitalPhonix
A DHCP server for those who are wondering
bravetraveler
Won't take long, ISC doesn't do 'much' but they do it well
bpbp-mango
they certainly made some memorable CVEs well
kjellsbells
I remember Dan Bernstein (djb) being scathing about BIND. To the extent of writing his own DNS suite. Is that all ancient history now?
bravetraveler
I'll let everyone make their own judgement :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Djbdns
Find something as popular that hasn't been scathed-about; I'll wait
somerandomqaguy
Next gen reference DHCP server. IIRC it's new thing is IPv6 support.
null
lousken
DHCP server?
ISC DHCPd is (being) EOLed.
Kea is ISC's new DHCP server.