kea
Kea is the bleeding edge DHCP server of the Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) . The older dhcpd is end of life .
Installation
Install the kea package. For additional documentation install kea-docs. Additional optional dependencies are:
- mariadb as database backend
- postgresql as database backend
- krb5 for kerberos support
- python to use kea-shell
Usage
kea includes four systemd unit files:
unit file | purpose |
---|---|
kea-dhcp4.service | The IPv4 dhcp daemon. |
kea-dhcp6.service | The IPv6 dhcp daemon. |
kea-dhcp-ddns.service | The DNS update daemon. |
kea-ctrl-agent.service | Exposing a REST interface for managing Kea servers. |
Configuration
The configuration files are located under /etc/kea
. The content of the configuration files uses JSON structures. For special configurations that are not yet included in the following examples, please refer to the Kea documentation.
IPv4 DHCP
To use DHCP for IPv4, the configuration file /etc/kea/kea-dhcp4.conf
must be adapted and the service kea-dhcp4.service
must be activated and started.
192.168/16
(subnet192.168.0.0
, netmask255.255.0.0
)172.16/12
(subnet172.16.0.0
, netmask255.240.0.0
)10/8
(for large networks; subnet10.0.0.0
, netmask255.0.0.0
)
See also RFC 1918.
Make sure to assign a static IP address to the interface on which Kea is listen on.
Example configuration
Assumptions for the example:
- The net is
192.168.0.0/24
- DNS server has the IP
192.168.0.1/24
- Gateway has the IP
192.168.0.254/24
- Static IP of the DHCP server network interface
eth0
is192.168.0.253/24
- Kea should provide IPs from
192.168.0.100/24
to192.168.0.199/24
A minimal configuration file /etc/kea/kea-dhcp4.conf
could look like:
/etc/kea/kea-dhcp4.conf
{ "Dhcp4": { "interfaces-config": { "interfaces": [ "enp1s0/192.168.0.253" ], "dhcp-socket-type": "raw" }, "subnet4": [ { "id": 1, "subnet": "192.168.0.0/24", "pools": [ { "pool": "192.168.0.100 - 192.168.0.199" } ], "option-data": [ { "name": "routers", "data": "192.168.0.254" }, { "name": "domain-name-servers", "data": "192.168.0.1" } ] } ] } }
The configuration file can be checked for errors by running the command:
# kea-dhcp4 -t /etc/kea/kea-dhcp4.conf
If everything looks ok enable and start Kea:
# systemctl enable kea --now
Check the log output of Kea by running the command:
# journalctl -u kea-dhcp4.service