Yes please.
We started to see strange behavior on the network and it took a bit of trial and error to figure out what was going wrong. Eventually, we traced it down to dnsmasq being unable to keep up with all the DHCP UDP traffic regardless of how we tuned the kernel/networking buffers.
Switched to Kea and all of our problems magically went away.
Are they primarily used for mining?
There is a good fairly easily discovered discord out there for enthusiasts.
Kea is ISC's new DHCP server.
More than that, it is an ISC project, is the successor to ISC DHCP (now end-of-life & unsupported for a few years), and weirdly started out as part of BIND 10.
Ref: https://www.isc.org/dhcphistory/#the-kea-dhcp-server
(And I vaguely recall it's used as the DHCP component in a few other things, like maybe Infoblox).
(This is one place where I think a little editorializing to the page title to add context would be helpful.)
Kea's new thing is scaling up for very large/complex installations (multithreading, database backends, a fair amount of plugins for specialized use cases). Which almost nobody really needs to do, so it's a shame ISC dhcpd was discontinued before Kea was at full feature parity.
Note: in general, both OPNsense and pfSense are excellent. I have never had any problems with either one.
Anyway, at the time Kea (at least in pfSense) wasn't able to do that, which caused things to break for me for a bit. It's a small thing (and, I mean, totally fair with free software) but the fact that they pushed an update to Kea before Kea (again, at least in pfSense) was at feature parity rubbed me the wrong way and has kept me from using it since then.
(edit: on the off chance anyone cares, I decided to check and it looks like this issue has been fixed as of pfSense CE 2.8.)
From the 25.1.6 OPNsense May update notes:
> Last but not least: Kea DHCPv6 is here. And with it full DHCP and router advertisement support in Dnsmasq to bridge the gap for ISC users who do not need or want Kea. We are going to make Dnsmasq DHCP the default in new installations starting with 25.7, too. ISC DHCP will still be around as a core component in 25.7 but likely moves to plugins for 26.1 next year.
(I'm the author of a JS framework with the same name)
I was quite ok with paying the $500 or so to license the features, but the friction to get that through procurement processes also ended up killing it.
Kea is perfect for integrating with zero touch provisioning automation processes.
