The Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) has announced, with plenty of hints long in advance, that the ISC DHCP Server has reached EOL. The ISC's DHCP software has been available since the late 1990s and is widely used to automate the assignment of IPv4 addresses to a dynamic pool of clients. The article covers the ISC DHCP suite's history and evolution, along with brief biographies of its four main authors over its lifecycle. The main reasons for reaching EOL are that the codebase is very mature at this point and, significantly, the code base has not been designed for testability.
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. If we become aware of a significant security vulnerability, we might make an exception to this, but it is our intention to cease actively maintaining this codebase.
[...] The first release of the ISC DHCP distribution in December 1997 included just the DHCP server. Release 2 in June 1999 added a DHCP client and a BOOTP/DHCP relay agent. DHCP 3 was released in October 2001 and included DHCP failover support, OMAPI, Dynamic DNS, conditional behavior, client classing, and more. The 4.0 release in December 2007 introduced DHCPv6 protocol support for the server and client. The client and relay components reached their End-of-Life in January 2022.
The development of ISC DHCP paralleled the development of the protocol in the DHC working group (WG). The DHC working group was founded in 1989 by Ralph Droms, who also wrote IETF RFC 1531, the first version of the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol; it was standardized in October 1993. DHC is now the oldest WG that still functions.
How is networking managed in the computing environments where you operate? Often they are unavoidable. Which, if any, DHCP server have you switched to in those cases?
(Score: 2) by TheGratefulNet on Tuesday October 18 2022, @05:09PM (1 child)
I moved so much off my asus wifi AP over to my raspi box.
it does dns, dhcp, ntpd (strat1 via gps) and soon it will be a 2.4g AP as well.
the way you setup static dhcp entries is really nice. /etc/ethers and /etc/hosts. really simple. I like it. I now have stable ip addr's for wifi things just by a single edit of the mac addr to ethers and an entry in hosts. kill -HUP the dnsmasq proc and that's it.
the isc stuff should die, given how easy dnsmasq is.
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 5, Interesting) by TheGratefulNet on Tuesday October 18 2022, @05:11PM
re: 2.4ghz
a little secret. a lot of the current wifi6 and 6e routers dont do well when you ask them to serve both 5.8 and 2.4
let them do just the 5.8 stuff for wifi6 and 6e. have some OTHER box serve the b/g/n stuff.
I have a ton of esp8266 at home and they all need dhcp and ntp from my 2.4g network. I was finding that they'd lose time and connectivity when I asked my 'fast' wifi6 router to handle both bands.
by making the fast router JUST 6(e), its stable and fast and any old (literally old) ap box can do 2.4g just fine. put them both on the same eth at home and you're good to go.
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 5, Funny) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Tuesday October 18 2022, @05:45PM (4 children)
I use fixed IPs, like real men should. And I assign all my machines IPs in the 127.x.x.x range, and I don't even need a network cable for them to ping. That's the power of 127.x.x.x kid!
Learn networking with hair on its chest instead of lilly-livered DHCP and you'll get somewhere in life. Ah!
(Score: 3, Informative) by pTamok on Tuesday October 18 2022, @05:53PM
That's antediluvian. I use addresses in the range fc00::/7. Hah!
(Score: 5, Funny) by TheGratefulNet on Tuesday October 18 2022, @06:26PM
there's a chip shortage, and like many things, we have to do more with less.
I've moved from 127.* to 126.* just to do my part in the savings.
every bit counts.
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 2) by sigterm on Tuesday October 18 2022, @09:11PM (1 child)
How on earth did this get modded Insightful?
I really hope it's a meta-joke, but I fear it might not be.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Wednesday October 19 2022, @06:06AM
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Tuesday October 18 2022, @08:40PM
In my lab I was running Windows DHCP, but I needed the box to be a kitchen-sink/jack-of-all-trades and hit a weird bug with cifs performance when I multi-homed it, asked it to do NAT, and implement access lists. Now I have a OpenWrt VM that uses dnsmasq for DHCP in my lab.
The enterprise customers I work with use a mixture of Infoblox, BlueCat, and Windows DHCP. They all more-or-less just work.
(Score: 4, Informative) by fab23 on Tuesday October 18 2022, @09:07PM
As I am using the isc-dhcpd since ever, I will probably migrate to their newer DHCPd implementation called Kea. See https://www.isc.org/kea/ [isc.org] for more info. I will probably miss the old plain (long) config file.
(Score: 2) by epitaxial on Tuesday October 18 2022, @09:34PM (2 children)
Why switch if it works? Unless some glaring security issue or bug pops up it should continue to work until the OS designers break something.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 19 2022, @01:15AM (1 child)
Bit rot - I hear it became highly resistant to antifungals nowadays.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 19 2022, @09:35AM
You should try the new ECC-spray.