More Kea DHCP Daemon

I decided to try the kea DHCP daemon on my production server.

After setting up my new server (still in transition) with kea, I decided to try it on my Dell R530 PowerEdge, currently acting as my main server. It looked to me like kea-dhcp4 was better at figuring out which IP address to give out based on the network interface on which it received the DHCP DISCOVER packet. This may just be superstition on my part.

It wasn’t too hard to convert the dhcpd config file to kea-format. The JSON format that kea uses for config files requires more commas than the old dhcpcd format does, but kea’s “-t” option lets you try out a config file without actually stopping/restarting a server.

The new JSON format is a little clearer about which IP addresses belong to which subnets, and I discovered a problem in my old dhcpcd config file where I used the same ethernet (MAC) address twice.

The jq command line JSON processing utility is stricter than whatever JSON parser kea-dhcp4 uses. It might help to run kea-dhcp4.conf through jq just to get rid of any ambiguous constructs.

Apparently kea is not part of the problem I’ve had with my laptop taking a long time to acquire an IP address when associated with a WRT3200ACM wireless access point.