Welcome to ISC's Knowledgebase!

This site is intended to provide answers to many of the questions users may have about our open source software products: BIND 9, ISC DHCP, and Kea DHCP.

In this About ISC section, you'll find some general information that applies to all of our software. In the BIND 9, ISC DHCP, and Kea DHCP sections, you'll find lots of detailed information and helpful tips to make your network administration easier. Feel free to browse through everything, or use the search function to find articles on a specific topic of interest to you.

If you need more help than this Knowledgebase can provide, please consider joining one of our user mailing lists. These open fora offer best-effort support from other users of our software.

If mission-critical DNS and DHCP operations are important to you, we offer high-quality support from our team of experienced engineers as a paid service. Paid support contracts give ISC the funds we need to continue developing open source software that benefits the entire Internet. Please visit the Contact page on our main website for more details.

Thank you very much for using ISC's software! For more than 25 years, we have been here to serve the community and keep the Internet safe and accessible to all. To find out more about us, please visit our website at https://www.isc.org.

Kea Features

• Separate DHCPv4, DHCPv6 and Dynamic DNS servers (run only the applications you are using)
• Leases and host reservations can be stored in a local file (default) or optionally in a MySQL, Postgres or Cassandra database
• IPv6 prefix delegation
• Most popular options supported, including PXE boot
• Shared networks
• Applications API, with multiple application extensions available from ISC
• On-line configuration. It is possible to update the configuration file and tell the servers to reload configuration without restarting the system.
• Ample, documented statistics
• REST api for remote management
• High performance, with up to ~5000 leases per second (default), ~500 leases per second (with optional database backend)
• Supported on Linux, BSD and Mac OS X operating systems

Kea is the next generation of DHCP software, developed by Internet Systems Consortium (ISC). It supports both the DHCPv4 and DHCPv6 protocols along with their extensions, e.g. prefix delegation and dynamic updates to DNS.

This guide covers Kea version 2.7.1-git.

This document provides introductory information on how DNSSEC works, how to configure BIND 9 to support some commonDNSSEC features, as well as some basic troubleshooting tips. The chapters are organized as such:

Chapter 1 covers the intended audience for this document, assumed background knowledge, and a basic introduction to
the topicof DNSSEC.
Chapter 2 covers various requirements that are needed before implementing DNSSEC, such as software
versions, hardwarecapacity, network requirements, and security changes.
Chapter 3 walks through setting up a validating resolver, more information on the validation process, as well as
examples ofusing tools to verify that the resolver is validating answers.
Chapter 4 walks through setting up a basic signed authoritative zone, explains the relationship with the parent zone,
and on-goingmaintenance tasks.
Chapter 5 provides some tips on how to analyze and diagnose DNSSEC-related problems.
Chapter 6 covers several topics, from key generation, key storage, key management, NSEC and NSEC3, to
disadvantages ofDNSSEC.
Chapter 7 provides several working examples of common solutions, with step-by-step details

Broad, standards-compliant support for both DHCPv4 and DHCPv6

• Free-open source, shared under MPL 2.0 licensing

• Direct address assignment (DHCPv4 and DHCPv6) or DHCPv6 prefix delegation

• Dynamic IP addressing and static host reservations

• Dynamic DNS for updating DNS records as leases are renewed or expired

• Tracking of MAC addresses, even in DHCPv6

• Extend and customize Kea through Hooks

• Add and change subnets and pools without restarting Kea

• Store leases and host reservations in a MySQL, PostgreSQL or Cassandra database rather than a text file

• Replace the entire Kea configuration, or separately manage leases, subnets and host reservations through a REST API

• Comprehensive Developer and Administrator documentation.

• ISC offers commercial 7 x 24 support for Kea, as well as consulting and contract development to assist in implementing Kea, including migration from ISC DHCP.

Kea runs on Linux, BSD, and MacOS, like ISC DHCP. The Kea distribution does not yet include a DHCP client or relay, but because both are standards-based, the ISC DHCP client works fine with the Kea DHCP server. Kea is under active development.

The Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) offers a free version of its DHCP and DHCPv6 reference implementation. The following configuration settings are available with the ISC DHCP server, which are configured in the server's dhcpd.conf file.

How to set up the ISC DHCP daemon with load sharing and failover capabilities.

Setting Up DHCP Failover: A Basic Overview
Many of the syntax options presented here are explained in more detain in the dhcpd.conf man page distributed with dhcp. It is recommended that you consult that document for specifics once you have grasped the basic steps involved.

KEA is a new open source DHCPv4/DHCPv6 server being developed by ​Internet Systems Consortium. The objective of this project is to provide a very high-performance, extensible DHCP server engine for use by enterprises and service providers, either as is or with extensions and modifications.

​DHCP Standardization efforts: The lead developer on KEA is co-chair of the ​Dynamic Host Configuration working group in the ​IETF. We are committed to providing a standards-compliant implementation and are closely tracking developments in this working group and evaluating them for inclusion in KEA.