[Kea-users] Kea 2.5.5 is now available

[Victoria Risk]

Internet Systems Consortium is pleased to announce the release of Kea 2.5.5.

The current stable branch of Kea is Kea 2.4 and its most recent release is 2.4.1.
Releases in the Kea 2.5.x sequence are part of the Kea 2.5 development
branch, where new features are provided for testing and evaluation
before the branch is designated stable and recommended for production use.

Kea source tarballs are available from cloudsmith.io:

https://dl.cloudsmith.io/public/isc/kea-2-5/raw/versions/2.5.5/kea-2.5.5.tar.gz <https://dl.cloudsmith.io/public/isc/kea-2-5/raw/versions/2.5./kea-2.5.4.tar.gz> <https://dl.cloudsmith.io/public/isc/kea-2-5/raw/versions/2.5.5/kea-2.5.5.tar.gz <https://dl.cloudsmith.io/public/isc/kea-2-5/raw/versions/2.5./kea-2.5..tar.gz>>

And from the ISC download page:  https://www.isc.org/download/#Kea

Also note that we have recently introduced an experimental Docker image.
Kea Dockers are vailable in a separate repository on Cloudsmith: https://cloudsmith.io/~isc/repos/docker/packages/
——

The following bug fixes and features have been implemented since the 
previous release, version 2.5.4:

 1. **Hub-and-spoke model in High Availability (HA)**: Kea can now 
handle multiple HA relationships. In particular, it can handle the 
popular scenario of a central office (hub) providing failover support to 
multiple smaller satellite offices (spokes), reducing the number of 
servers required overall for a high-availability deployment. Extensive 
tests of this new functionality have not yet been completed, so use this 
with caution and consider it an experimental feature [ #3178, #1149].
 2. **ARM packages**: Starting with this release, binary packages are 
provided for aarch64 architecture, in addition to the usual x64 (amd64) 
architecture. The Hammer build tool has been extended to support aarch64 
[ #3186].
 3. **Bulk leasequery and IPv6 prefixes**: Kea now returns all the 
associated PD (Prefix Delegation) leases when queried over BLQ protocol 
[ #3149].
 4. **New global parameters in Config Backend**: The Configuration 
Backend now supports scalar parameters contained by top-level global 
scopes: `compatibility`, `control-socket`, `dhcp-ddns`, 
`expired-leases-processing`, `multi-threading`, `sanity-checks`, 
`server-id`, and `dhcp-queue-control`. The parameters may be stored 
using dot notation; for example, the `lenient-option-parsing` parameter 
in the `compatibility` scope can be referenced as 
`compatbility.lenient-option-parsing` [ #1790].
 5. **RADIUS and HA**: The RADIUS hook has the ability to send 
accounting updates to the RADIUS server. In scenarios where HA and 
RADIUS hooks are used together, the Kea server sends accounting updates 
when receiving lease updates from a partner, even if the partner already 
sent them. This might not be preferable in some deployments. A new 
option `peer-updates` can be set to "false" to disable this behavior [ 
#3123].
 6. **Vendor options in NETCONF**: The NETCONF model has been updated 
and Kea code has been corrected to properly handle vivso 
(vendor-independent vendor-specific) options [ #3198].
 7. **Ping-check hook updates**: Ping-check now honors the network 
state. Under certain circumstances, such as various HA states or 
administrative action (the `dhcp-disable` command), the Kea server can 
operate in a disabled state where no DHCP traffic is serviced. Starting 
with this release, the ping-check hook now obeys the global state and 
refrains from sending ICMP packets when no DHCP packets are to be sent [ 
#3187]. Ping-check is now able to operate in single-threaded mode [ 
#3107]. The ping-check hook now updates HA partners if a lease is 
declined [ #3110].
 8. **Database connection retry on startup**: Kea can be set to not 
retry database connection attempts on startup. The new 
'retry-on-startup' parameter controls this behavior along with the other 
existing parameters: 'on-fail', 'max-reconnect-tries', and 
'reconnect-wait-time' [ #3019].
 9. **Classless static route option**: Option 121 for DHCPv4 is now 
supported [ #3074].
10. **RADIUS**: The legacy RADIUS hook based on the FreeRADIUS-client 
has been removed. Moving forward, the new implementation, which is 
entirely Kea-based with no external dependencies, is the only way to use 
RADIUS in Kea [ #3168].
11. **Documentation**: The Knowledgebase (KB) article about installing 
Kea from packages was expanded and now explains how to optionally 
configure a proxy to reach the appropriate Cloudsmith repository. For 
details, see https://kb.isc.org/docs/isc-kea-packages [ #3136].
12. **Bug fixes**: A new warning message is shown when the 
`ip-reservation-unique` flag is set to "true", but the database contains 
multiple reservations for the same IP [ #3108]. The run(), run_once(), 
and poll() methods in IOService are now guarded against possible 
exceptions [ #3112]. Many smaller issues reported by Coverity Scan were 
fixed [ #3119]. The getopt function call has been improved to adhere 
better to Alpine's musl implementation [ #2788].
13. **Build improvements**: `hammer`, a Kea build tool used mostly by QA 
and release engineering, has gotten a new `--just-configure` option [ 
#3229]. Compilation issues with the Botan library have been fixed [ 
#3191]. Hammer was updated to build Kea while no longer needing the 
FreeRADIUS-client dependency [ #3128].
14. **Kea Premium License updated**: The end-user license agreement for 
commercially licensed Kea hooks has been updated to clarify some terms. 
The current version is 2.1.1.

## Incompatible Changes

1. **Legacy RADIUS hook removed**: With this release, the new RADIUS 
hook is fully functional and is a complete replacement for the old 
implementation. The old FreeRADIUS-client based hook has been removed [ 
#3168].

Release note: https://downloads.isc.org/isc/kea/2.5.5/Kea-2.5.5-ReleaseNotes.txt <https://downloads.isc.org/isc/kea/2.5./Kea-2.5.4-ReleaseNotes.txt>


Thank you again to everyone who assisted us in making this release
possible.

We look forward to receiving your feedback.

-- 
ISC Kea team
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