# ISC DHCP server is EOL



## Phishfry (Oct 12, 2022)

Wow. I never thought I would see an established open source software go EOL.
What a strange decision.





						ISC DHCP Server has reached EOL
					

What is changing? The 4.4.3-P1 and 4.1-ESV-R16-P2 versions of ISC DHCP, released on October 5, 2022, are the last maintenance versions of this software that ISC plans to publish.




					www.isc.org
				




Thank Goodness for DNSMasq.





						Dnsmasq - network services for small networks.
					






					thekelleys.org.uk


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## Jose (Oct 12, 2022)

Looks like they really want you to look at Kea, their new DHCP server. I will, but I will also look at Freeradius and Dnsmasq.


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## Phishfry (Oct 12, 2022)

Jose said:


> Kea


So their new daemon is kead...
Very informative compared to dhcpd.


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## Alain De Vos (Oct 12, 2022)

We have an end. Why shouldn't software.


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## Datapanic (Oct 12, 2022)

Ran Kea v1.6 at work a while ago and it had a nasty bug in its db section that corrupted the database and it started giving out duplicate IP addresses.  They did fix it later on but that was enough to switch to something else.


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## tanis (Oct 12, 2022)

Stumbled across the following link sometime ago:

Kea High Availability vs ISC DHCP Failover


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## tanis (Oct 12, 2022)

Datapanic said:


> Ran Kea v1.6 at work a while ago and it had a nasty bug in its db section that corrupted the database and it started giving out duplicate IP addresses.  They did fix it later on but that was enough to switch to something else.


What exactly did u chose ?


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## SirDice (Oct 12, 2022)

It's nice to see the link to the alternatives. Anyone else noticed it has "yes" in the BSD column for every alternative?






						Comparison of DHCP server software - Wikipedia
					






					en.wikipedia.org
				




Unfortunately many of them don't appear to have a port for it. 
dhcpy6d - no port?
dibbler - no port?
dnsmasq - dns/dnsmasq
ISC DHCP - net/isc-dhcp44-server
FreeRADIUS - net/freeradius3 I'm not sure if this version actually has DHCP support
Jagornet DHCP - no port?
Kea DHCP - net/kea
udhcpd - no port?
WIDE-DHCPv6 - net/dhcp6

I also found these, that aren't mentioned in the 'alternatives' list:
net/dhcpcd
net/dhcpd

There might be a few other ports I missed.


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## hardworkingnewbie (Oct 12, 2022)

I don't like Dnsmasq, because it's not compliant with the UNIX philosophy: do one job only, and do that well!

Aside being a DHCP server it is also a DNS server/forwarder, and that's something which should be definitely not part of a DHCP server.


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## SirDice (Oct 12, 2022)

hardworkingnewbie said:


> Aside being a DHCP server it is also a DNS server/forwarder, and that's something which should be definitely not part of a DHCP server.


Maybe, maybe not. Many people (including myself) have their DHCP and DNS linked (so resolving actually works for dynamic hosts). So it certainly makes sense to combine them in this case. The combination RADIUS and DHCP doesn't make sense to me though but I'm sure there's a use-case for that too (ISP/Hosting perhaps?).


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## Jose (Oct 12, 2022)

SirDice said:


> I also found these, that aren't mentioned in the 'alternatives' list:
> net/dhcpcd


This is a DHCP client only (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol Client Daemon). I know it well from my days using Gentoo. Another great project from former Gentoo (now Netbsd) dev Roy Marples (Uberlord).


SirDice said:


> net/dhcpd


This is a port of the Openbsd DHCP daemon. It appears to be a fork of ISC-DHCPD. It unfortunately does not appear to do  failover or load balancing, but does support Bootp.


SirDice said:


> The combination RADIUS and DHCP doesn't make sense to me though but I'm sure there's a use-case for that too (ISP/Hosting perhaps?).


I think you need Radius for 801.2X authentication, which you might want to perform before you hand out an IP address.



hardworkingnewbie said:


> I don't like Dnsmasq, because it's not compliant with the UNIX philosophy: do one job only, and do that well!


Unfortunately Freeradius does not do Bootp. I'm going to need a combo of Freeradius and something that does support that. Maybe Openbsd dhcpd.


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## SirDice (Oct 12, 2022)

Jose said:


> I think you need Radius for 801.2X authentication, which you might want to perform before you hand out an IP address.


Right, completely forgot about 801.2x. Haven't actually dealt with that in any of my contracting jobs.

I think I'm going to give net/kea a go. Don't need HA or fail-over on my home network, or use a database. I'm hoping it links to BIND in the same way as ISC DHCPd did. I really don't want to switch BIND to something else too.


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## Alain De Vos (Oct 12, 2022)

If really neededed inetd-bootpd for diskless ?


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## Phishfry (Oct 12, 2022)

Alain De Vos said:


> We have an end. Why shouldn't software.


This may be true in a Windows dominated world but I don't need constant software upgrading.
Make a product and polish until great. Then put in maintenance mode.
Don't try and add the kitchen sink with fireworks.

dnsmasq and isc dhcpd both had nearly identical have similar configuration syntax.
That is groovy.


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## Datapanic (Oct 13, 2022)

tanis said:


> What exactly did u chose ?


I didn't have a say.  The boss chose Windows DHCP server.


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## hruodr (Oct 13, 2022)

Alain De Vos said:


> We have an end. Why shouldn't software.


Or the other way, perfect things are immortal, do not need to change.

That is why TeX versions converge to pi, metafont versions to e.


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## Datapanic (Oct 13, 2022)

I installed Kea on one of my home network servers a year ago and today, I went ahead and switched over my isc-dhcpd setup to Kea.  Kea is actually pretty nice and integrates with isc-bind and mysql server with no problems.  The configuration takes some time.  It also can integrate with Stork for a Bind and Kea Dashboard but it has problems with FreeBSD.


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## mickey (Oct 14, 2022)

I took a look at Kea some time ago as an alternative to the aging isc-dhcpd, unfortunately my personal experience with it was a rather unpleasant one. Building Kea from source took ages compared to isc-dhcpd, the configuration file uses JSON and did not even allow for comments which makes it rather error prone and hard to maintain. Also running Kea, even in a rather minimal setup, seemed to be quite resource hungry in comparison to isc-dhcpd. I also remember that there were some features I use with isc-dhpd that could not (at that time) be (easily) done with Kea, but don't remember the specifics. Back then I decided not to go down the Kea road, but with isc-dhcpd going EOL that might not leave much of a choice.

As for some of the alternatives, I agree that having one software do one job right is the logical choice, even if there might be use cases where such combined solutions might make some sense.


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