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canopic jug [soylentnews.org] writes:

The Internet Systems Consortium [isc.org] (ISC) has announced, with plenty of hints long in advance, that the ISC DHCP Server has reached EOL [isc.org]. 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 [ietf.org] was founded in 1989 by Ralph Droms [ietf.org], who also wrote IETF RFC 1531 [ietf.org], 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?

Original Submission