Who is using the ISC DHCP server in their FAI environment?

[Dara Poon]

Thomas,

We are using ISC DHCP in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of British Columbia.

We generate our dhcpd.conf programmatically from our in-house IP address management tool, and our template does things like putting devices that are marked as FAI-enabled into the appropriate DHCP subclass and giving them fixed IP addresses.  I'm aware that ISC DHCP is EOL, so there's programming work needed to migrate to kea.  (For our multiple-subnet environment, dnsmasq is not sufficiently featureful.)  I'm not looking forward to having to do that migration, but I suppose that it's unavoidable.

We also use other tools that integrate with DHCP similarly, such as https://fogproject.org <https://fogproject.org/> for imaging Windows workstations.

Dara Poon
UBC IT Services — Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering



> On May 27, 2025, at 00:33, Thomas Lange <lange at cs.uni-koeln.de> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I like to know who is using the DHCP server from ISC when doing a FAI
> network installation. Debian plans to remove this package for the
> upcoming release (trixie) and I'm not sure how much work it may cause
> to sysadmin to migrate to a replacement, for e.g. the new DHCPD from
> ISC called kea.
> 
> Did anyone already migrated to kea?
> Do you think you can easily migrate to kea or dnsmasq or other
> packages?
> 
> Currently FAI provides examples for the dhcpd.conf for ISC dhcp, but
> if Debian removes the isc dhcp package, I cannot provide a working
> config for the trixie release in time and FAI users have to do it on
> their own.
> 
> I'll try to convince the Debian release team to keep ISC dhcp for the
> trixie release, but some people want to remove it , because it's EOL
> and there will be no security support by Debian any more.
> 
> What's your oppinion on that?
> -- 
> best regards Thomas