[Kea-users] Host Reservations stored in DB

[Marcin Siodelski]

On 07.04.2015 08:08, Bryan Seitz wrote:
>
> > On Apr 6, 2015, at 5:40 PM, Fletcher Haynes <fhaynes at willamette.edu>
> wrote:
> >
> > Hello!
> >
> > We have a large environment (thousands of hosts) where most hosts
> need a static reservation. For the past 10+ years, we have been using
> a custom DHCP server written in Perl that did all of its lookups for
> host reservations in a postgres db. Recently, we have migrated to
> bind9, and are approximating this with regular generation of conf
> files from the database and OMAPI. This works ok, but we would like to
> have a DHCP server with better support for this.
> >
> >  From what I can tell, Kea will have functionality for storing host
> reservations in a MySQL or Postgres backend, and it is currently
> slated for the 1.1 release? Could you use help with implementing this
> feature, or testing it when it is ready?
> >
>
> +1 On this comment.  Seems like having an SQL backed DHCP server,
> being able to store host reservations in the DB would be a primary
> feature.
> Also happy to assist / help test etc.
>

We are planning on implementing this feature and it is currently 
scheduled for 1.1 release. We had to defer it due to time constraints 
but it is definitely something that has high priority on our roadmap as 
many users seem to desire this functionality.

As of Kea 0.9.1 you can store host reservations in the Kea configuration 
file and they are held in memory. Some advantage of this approach is 
that the reservation lookup is very fast, as opposed to the lookup in 
the SQL database which requires inter process communication. However, 
we're aware that large deployments often tend to use external databases 
for various reasons.

One question which remains open is whether there is a demand for Kea to 
ship with the management tool to add/remove/modify reservations in the 
database. I'd assume that many users would implement their own 
management tools but probably many of them wouldn't. Would you?

Not sure if you had a chance to review the design for the host 
reservations. It includes the bits about storing reservations in the SQL 
database:

http://kea.isc.org/wiki/HostReservationDesign

All comments welcome.

Thanks for the offer for testing this feature. Stay tuned.

Marcin