Stork 0.7.0, May 8th, 2020, Release Notes

Welcome to the Stork 0.7.0 release. This is the seventh development release of the Stork project, which is a modern, responsive, and scalable dashboard for Kea with a well-defined REST API interface. The long-term goal of the project is to provide a monitoring and management solution for BIND 9 and Kea DHCP. This is the first release we believe is suitable for a broader audience.

The features and changes introduced in this version are:

1. Dashboard. Stork now features a dashboard, which provides all the most essential information: the top 5 subnets and networks with highest pool utilization; overall statistics; the status of your Kea and BIND apps, including important details such as online and HA status; and more. If Grafana is configured, a dedicated link to show statistics for each subnet and network is shown. #226 (closed)

2. Kea HA Status improvements. The High Availability status of Kea is an important aspect of a DHCP service. Kea HA status is now more detailed and easier to understand; the entire widget is color-coded (green/yellow/red) to indicate status at a glance. Details of the server and its partner include online status, when it was last in contact with its peer, what the current HA state is, and more. There's also a link to switch the view between a server and its partner. #215 (closed), #251 (closed), #228 (closed)

3. Reservations in Kea. Two improvements have been implemented. Stork is now able to show global host reservations. #263 (closed) There are two ways where reservations can be stored in Kea: a config file (which is suitable for smaller, more static deployments) and in a database (which is better for larger, dynamic environments). Stork is now able to display reservations coming from both sources and show the source where a particular reservation was retrieved from. To get the information from a database, the Kea host_cmds hook must be installed. #246 (closed)

4. BIND 9 includes. It was reported that the earlier Stork agent version was not able to detect BIND 9 running on Debian 10. The problem was root-caused to the BIND 9 config using includes, which confused the Stork agent. The agent is now able to handle include directives in configurations properly. #243 (closed)

5. Global search. A new convenience feature offers a global search on all data available. This is particularly useful if you want to look for anything related to an IP or MAC address. You may get a subnet, a reservation, and a network. If you search for a specific MAC address or part of it, Stork will return a list of matching reservations. #256 (closed)

6. Grafana integration. Our team continues to improve Grafana integration. There is a simple configuration menu, where a link to Grafana can be set. If configured, links to specific subnets will be shown in the dashboard and the list of subnets. #231 (closed), #244 (closed)

7. Help system. A context-sensitive menu system has been implemented. For the time being it is basic and covers only part of the UI, but it is expected to grow over time. #217 (closed)

8. Expanded Access. The code is now available on github. We created a small Stork website with links to all relevant resources. Stork 0.7.0 will be available on the ISC downloads page as well as on the ISC ftp server. We've renamed the stork-dev list to stork-users, indicating that it's now ready for production users. We created a gallery of screenshots to let prospective users take a quick look at what they can expect. Finally, we did our first webinar about Stork on May 6, 2020. This and other recordings are available on the ISC presentations page. #232 (closed)

9. Bugfixes. As usual, there are many smaller bugfixes. The notable ones are: a fix in native packages (agent and server packages no longer conflict, so they both can be installed on the same system #229 (closed)), incorrect database credentials are handled better, and the cryptic inappropriate ioctl for device error is now gone. #203 (closed)

Release Model

Stork has monthly development releases on the first Wednesday of each month (with some exceptions around holidays), although we sometimes delay it a bit for last-minute changes.

We encourage users to test the development releases and report back their findings on the stork-users mailing list, available at https://lists.isc.org/mailman/listinfo/stork-users.

This text references issue numbers. For more details, visit the Stork GitLab page at https://gitlab.isc.org/isc-projects/stork/issues.

License

This version of Stork is released under the Mozilla Public License, version 2.0.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0

Download

The easiest way to install the software is to use native deb or RPM packages. They can be downloaded from:

https://cloudsmith.io/~isc/repos/stork/

The Stork source and PGP signature for this release may be downloaded from:

https://downloads.isc.org/isc/stork

The signature was generated with the ISC code signing key which is available at:

https://www.isc.org/pgpkey

ISC provides documentation in the Stork Administrator Reference Manual. It is currently available only in the source form in the docs/ directory, and the Sphinx tool is required to build it. This is expected to change in a future release.

We ask users of this software to please let us know how it worked for you and what operating system you tested on. Feel free to share your feedback on the stork-users mailing list (https://lists.isc.org/mailman/listinfo/stork-users). We would also like to hear whether the documentation is adequate and accurate. Please open tickets in the Stork GitLab project for bugs, documentation omissions and errors, and enhancement requests. We want to hear from you even if everything worked.

Support

Professional support for Stork will become available once it reaches the 1.0 milestone. Existing ISC customers that consider themselves very early adopters may get involved in the development process, including roadmap, features planning, and early testing, but the software maturity level does not constitute a typical professional service before the 1.0 milestone.

Free best-effort support is provided by our user community via a mailing list. Information on all public email lists is available at https://www.isc.org/mailinglists/. If you have any comments or questions about working with Stork, please share them to the stork-users List (https://lists.isc.org/mailman/listinfo/stork-users). Bugs and feature requests may be submitted via GitLab at https://gitlab.isc.org/isc-projects/stork/issues.

Changes

The following summarizes changes and important upgrades since the Stork 0.6.0 release.

* 62 [func] marcin

    Global host reservations in Kea are shown in the UI.
    (Gitlab #263)

* 61 [func] godfryd

    Implemented global search. It allows for looking across different
    entity types.
    (Gitlab #256)

* 60 [func] marcin

    HA state is presented in the dashboard.
    (Gitlab #251)

* 59 [func] marcin

    The list of hosts now includes a tag indicating if the host
    has been specified in the Kea configuration file or a host
    database. In addition, a bug has been fixed which caused some
    hosts to be associated with more then one Kea app, even when
    only one of them actually had them configured.
    (Gitlab #246)

* 58 [func] godfryd

    Improved presenting Kea daemons on Kea app page. There have
    been added links to subnet, shared network and hosts reservations
    pages with filtering set to given app id.
    (Gitlab #241)

* 57 [bug] marcin

    Fixed a bug in the HA service detection when new Kea app was
    being added. The visible side effect of this bug was the lack
    of the link to the remote server app in the HA status view
    in the UI.
    (Gitlab #240)

* 56 [func] godfryd

    Added links to Grafana. Added web page for managing global
    settings.
    (Gitlab #231)

* 55 [bug] godfryd

    Fixed starting Stork server: now if password to database
    is set to empty it does not ask for password in terminal.
    It asks only when the STORK_DATABASE_PASSWORD environment
    variable does not exist.
    (Gitlab #203)

* 54 [func] marcin

    Improved Kea High Availability status monitoring. The status is
    cached in the database and thus it is available even if the
    HA partners are offline. The presented status now includes
    connectivity status between Stork and the Kea servers, the
    time of the last failover event and others.
    (Gitlab #226)

* 53 [func] godfryd

    Added a dashboard presenting DHCP and DNS overview.
    (Gitlab #226)

* 52 [func] godfryd

    Added links to BIND 9 manual and Kea manual in Help menu.
    (Gitlab #221)

* 51 [bug] matthijs

    Added querying named stats from Bind 9 apps periodically.
    (Gitlab #211)

Thank you again to everyone who assisted us in making this release possible.

We look forward to receiving your feedback.