[Samba] Again kea DHCP-Server

[Owen DeLong]

Well, I have a slightly different opinion.

1. I’ll channel Jon Postel here a little bit — Networks and Systems should be as simple
as possible and no simpler… IMHO, DNSMASQ is too simple for most of the
DHCP environments I deal with and I find its structure frustrating at best.

2. Yes, KEA seems over complex when you first approach it. Mainly, that’s because
there’s too much text book documentation and not enough basic example and
HOWTO out there (yet). KEA is definitely capable of being much more complex
than traditional ISC DHCPd that we all know and love… However…

3. ISC DHCPd has become quite a hodgepodge of hacks and a conglomeration
of code spaghetti over the years as various ornaments got hung on the DHCP
tree. KEA is a concerted effort by ISC to step back and look at creating a clean
server with all the modern capabilities needed in a reference implementation
of DHCP that provides literally every possible feature. IMHO, it’s an excellent
effort by very talented people.

That said, it does have some shortcomings. ARM support has been limited
(nonexistent) until very recently. ARM packages still aren’t out (yet), but there
is good progress towards this recently and I am hopeful that we will see full
ARM support for KEA on par with x86 very soon now.

In most use cases, KEA (once you get past a small learning curve) isn’t significantly
harder to manage than ISC DHCP and actually offers much greater flexibility in where
you put various things in the configuration file and how you manage things like
reservations, pools, options, etc.

The Client Classing engine in Kea is top notch and very functional, but again, it
does come with a bit of a learning curve. The ability to have separate namespaces
for vendor options (and custom options) will appeal to anyone who has had to
deal with subnets with more than one different and incompatible vendor-specific
use of DHCP options 43 and 60. (try that with DNSMASQ… I dare you).

Unfortunately, i lack the Samba experience to reliably implement what is needed
here, but I am happy to provide what kea expertise and experience I have to an
effort to address this issue if someone more versed in Samba wants to collaborate.

Owen


On Nov 1, 2023, at 08:24, Rowland Penny via samba <samba at lists.samba.org> wrote:

On Wed, 1 Nov 2023 15:56:46 +0100 Stefan Kania via samba <samba at lists.samba.org> wrote: > Hi to all, > nearly one year a<x-msg://95/#link>͏​​‌͏
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On Wed, 1 Nov 2023 15:56:46 +0100
Stefan Kania via samba <samba at lists.samba.org> wrote:

> Hi to all,
> nearly one year ago someone ask about the kea-DHCP support for Samba.
> In the Samba wiki I still can only find the idc-dhcp stuff. @Rowland
> will you (and can you) replace or add the setup of kea to the wiki?
> Would be nice :-)
>
> Stefan
>

Hi Stefan, the problem is two fold:

A) At the moment my DCs are still running Bullseye (they are
running on Raspberry pi 4 and Bookworm has only recently been released)

B) In my opinon, Using Kea for the task is overkill (but then I think
Kea is overkill for anything)

If/When I do rewrite the script, it will be using the dhcp server built
into dnsmasq, a much simpler set up.

If some else whats to use Kea, then I wish them luck.

Rowland


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