[Kea-users] a few questions from a Kea newbie

[Jason Keltz]

Hi.

I'm investigating migrating from ISC DHCPd to Kea and running into a few 
issues.

I see some conflicting information online, due to kea development over 
time, so I was hoping to ask here for some clarification.

1) Is it really necessary to install a database backend such as 
Postgres/MySQL if I want to have static host reservations?  This was 
working so perfectly with dhcpd without any db backend for such a long 
time.  Not having a DB backend on the DHCP server means one less thing 
to worry about when Kea is updated, or the DB updated.   I accept that 
performance of the DB is likely going to be better than the reservations 
being stored in a text file, but for my basic setup, it just doesn't 
matter to me. The simplicity of not needing a DB for this over-rides the 
performance gain that may be attained with a DB.  I just want to be sure 
that I haven't overlooked something.

2) Does Kea permit multiple ethernet addresses mapped to the same IPv4 
IP?  I do this for multiple reasons - for example, I may have a server 
that has 2 ethernet addresses, and when I plug it in, whether I use one 
or the other network port, the IP should be the same.  Obviously I 
shouldn't plug in both or things would break, but that would be my 
problem.  At the same time, maybe a laptop has an ethernet port built 
in, but when plugged into a dock that has its own network port, I want 
the machine to get the same IP one way or the other (static 
reservation).  Now, I think I can permit this by enabling 
"ip-reservations-unique" to false, but I wanted to clarify.  Again, I 
did this with DHCPd all the time.

3) Finally - does Kea permit multiple IPv4 IPs for the same ethernet 
address?  I believe that "ip-reservations-unique" does not permit this, 
yet this is more important for me, and I did this with dhcpd.  For 
example, in different places in the building there are different VLANs.  
Most hosts just get a static IP reservation from DHCP.  99% of hosts 
will ever be on one VLAN. However, for say, my test laptop that has a 
single IP reserved on every VLAN - can Kea handle this scenario?

Answers to these questions would be a great start!

Thanks for reading..

Jason.