Upgrading Packages Beyond Kea 2.3.2

Upgrading Beyond Kea 2.3.2 using ISC Packages

In Kea 2.3.1 and 2.3.2, a major overhaul took place to standardize Kea's packages across supported platforms. As a part of this effort, the names of the packages on each platform, and the way that the packages are split up has been unified. These changes provide a more uniform experience for installing and managing Kea on different platforms, and also ensures that each platform is aligned from a security standpoint.

We have gone to great lengths to ensure that upgrading Kea from a version before 2.3.2 to a version after 2.3.2 is as smooth a process as possible. On Alpine and RPM based systems, you should be able to upgrade Kea (likely after updating the package repositories) using the normal package update process for your platform. However, Debian users will need to follow the instructions outlined below to perform the upgrade successfully.

The list of ISC provided Kea packages for 2.3.2 and later on every supported distribution are as follows:

Instructions for Debian and Ubuntu

When upgrading beyong Kea 2.3.2 on Ubuntu and Debian, you will need to upgrade using apt dist-upgrade instead of the typical apt upgrade. This is due to some packages being renamed. APT will not remove packages with the normal apt upgrade command, and instead the dist-upgrade command should be used.

It is possible for some services to be removed in certain scenarios when upgrading past 2.3.2. The best way to handle this is to simply apt install isc-kea after performing the upgrade. This metapackage specifically depends on all of the Kea service, tools, and hooks packages and will install the entire Kea software suite. If you instead prefer to install specific packages, you can still do so. Please see ISC Packages for Kea DHCP for more details.

Notable changes

The changes performed during this package overhaul have been summarized in the GitLab issue and its related merge requests. A more concise summary will be added to this section shortly.

Package Names Prior to Kea 2.3.2

Prior to Kea 2.3.2, the package names and split methodology differed from Linux distribution to Linux distribution. The names of the packages on each platform can be found below.