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 currently supports 198 commands in kea-ctrl-agent, kea-dhcp-ddns, kea-dhcp4, kea-dhcp6 daemons and cb_cmds, class_cmds, gss_tsig, high_availability, host_cache, host_cmds, lease_cmds, lease_query, perfmon, stat_cmds, subnet_cmds hook libraries.

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.

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