Happy Birthday to ISC’s DHCP4

On November 29th ISC’s DHCP4 will turn 18.

The first code for the DHCP project was committed to the source repository by Ted Lemon on 1995-11-29. Over the years, our contributors have committed over 9,500 changes, covering everything from small bug fixes to major enhancements. Today, our DHCP code supports clients, relays, and servers for both DHCPv4 and DHCPv6.

Looking forward, our next feature release, DHCP 4.3.0, will be coming out soon. Our focus is DHCPv6 uplift: we are enhancing the DHCPv6 code by adding popular DHCPv4 features not currently available in DHCPv6.

ISC is also moving forward with a new generation of DHCP code. Codenamed Kea, this project is a complete re-write of the DHCP code base to bring it more in line with current hardware and software capabilities.

On a personal note, as the current maintainer of ISC’s DHCP4 code base, I’d like to extend a big thank you to all of the previous maintainers and committers that have helped make the code what it is. The following people are listed in the repository log as having made contributions to ISC DHCP over the past eighteen years:

Mark Andrews, James Brister, Ben Cottrell, Francis Dupont, Michael Graff, David Hankins, Evan Hunt, Shane Kerr, Ted Lemon, Stephen Morris, Tomasz Mrugalski, Murray, Damien Neil, Jeremy Reed, and Paul Selkirk.

I’d also like to thank all the people that have and continue to use DHCP. It is wonderful to know that code I work on helps people connect to the Internet every day.

Regards,

Shawn Routhier