# 8. The Kea Control Agent

## 8.1. Overview of the Kea Control Agent

The Kea Control Agent (CA) is a daemon which exposes a RESTful control interface for managing Kea servers. The daemon can receive control commands over HTTP and either forward these commands to the respective Kea servers or handle these commands on its own. The determination whether the command should be handled by the CA or forwarded is made by checking the value of the `service` parameter, which may be included in the command from the controlling client. The details of the supported commands, as well as their structures, are provided in Management API.

The CA can use hook libraries to provide support for additional commands or to program custom behavior of existing commands. Such hook libraries must implement callouts for the `control_command_receive` hook point. Details about creating new hook libraries and supported hook points can be found in the Kea Developer's Guide.

The CA processes received commands according to the following algorithm:

- Pass command into any installed hooks (regardless of service value(s)). If the command is handled by a hook, return the response.

- If the service specifies one or more services, forward the command to the specified services and return the accumulated responses.

- If the service is not specified or is an empty list, handle the command if the CA supports it.

Note

The kea-ctrl-agent is deprecated. As of Kea 2.7.2 the Kea servers: kea-dhcp4, kea-dhcp6, and kea-dhcp-ddns directly support command API connections over HTTPS/HTTP. (Migration from the Control Agent).

## 8.2. Configuration

The following example demonstrates the basic CA configuration.

    {
        "Control-agent": {
            "http-host": "10.20.30.40",
            "http-port": 8000,
            "http-headers": [
                {
                    "name": "Strict-Transport-Security",
                    "value": "max-age=31536000"
                 }
            ],
            "trust-anchor": "/path/to/the/ca-cert.pem",
            "cert-file": "/path/to/the/agent-cert.pem",
            "key-file": "/path/to/the/agent-key.pem",
            "cert-required": true,
            "authentication": {
                "type": "basic",
                "realm": "kea-control-agent",
                "clients": [
                {
                    "user": "admin",
                    "password": "1234"
                } ]
            },

            "control-sockets": {
                "dhcp4": {
                    "comment": "main server",
                    "socket-type": "unix",
                    "socket-name": "/path/to/the/unix/socket-v4"
                },
                "dhcp6": {
                    "socket-type": "unix",
                    "socket-name": "/path/to/the/unix/socket-v6",
                    "user-context": { "version": 3 }
                },
                "d2": {
                    "socket-type": "unix",
                    "socket-name": "/path/to/the/unix/socket-d2"
                }
            },

            "hooks-libraries": [
            {
                "library": "/opt/local/custom_hooks_example.so",
                "parameters": {
                    "param1": "foo"
                }
            } ],

            "loggers": [ {
                "name": "kea-ctrl-agent",
                "severity": "INFO"
            } ]
        }
    }

The `http-host` and `http-port` parameters specify an IP address and port to which HTTP service will be bound. In the example configuration provided above, the RESTful service will be available at the URL `https://10.20.30.40:8000/`. If these parameters are not specified, the default URL is `http://127.0.0.1:8000/`.

When using Kea's HA hook library with multi-threading, the address:port combination used for CA must be different from the HA peer URLs, which are strictly for internal HA traffic between the peers. User commands should still be sent via the CA.

Since Kea 2.7.5 the `http-headers` parameter specifies a list of extra HTTP headers to add to HTTP responses.

The `trust-anchor`, `cert-file`, `key-file`, and `cert-required` parameters specify the TLS setup for HTTP, i.e. HTTPS. If these parameters are not specified, HTTP is used. The TLS/HTTPS support in Kea is described in TLS/HTTPS Support.

As mentioned in Overview of the Kea Control Agent, the CA can forward received commands to the Kea servers for processing. For example, `config-get` is sent to retrieve the configuration of one of the Kea services. When the CA receives this command, including a `service` parameter indicating that the client wishes to retrieve the configuration of the DHCPv4 server, the CA forwards the command to that server and passes the received response back to the client. More about the `service` parameter and the general structure of commands can be found in Management API.

The CA uses UNIX domain sockets to forward control commands and receive responses from other Kea services. The `dhcp4`, `dhcp6`, and `d2` maps specify the files to which UNIX domain sockets are bound. In the configuration above, the CA connects to the DHCPv4 server via `/path/to/the/unix/socket-v4` to forward the commands to it. Obviously, the DHCPv4 server must be configured to listen to connections via this same socket. In other words, the command-socket configuration for the DHCPv4 server and the CA (for that server) must match. Consult UNIX Control Socket, UNIX Control Socket, and UNIX Control Socket to learn how the UNIX socket configuration is specified for the DHCPv4, DHCPv6, and D2 services.

Note

As of Kea 2.7.9, control sockets may only reside in the directory determined during compilation as `"[kea-install-dir]/var/run/kea"`, which must also have `0750` access rights. This path may be overridden at startup by setting the environment variable `KEA_CONTROL_SOCKET_DIR` to the desired path. If a path other than this value is used in `socket-name`, Kea will emit an error and refuse to start or, if already running, log an unrecoverable error. For ease of use in simply omit the path component from `socket-name`.

User contexts can store arbitrary data as long as they are in valid JSON syntax and their top-level element is a map (i.e. the data must be enclosed in curly brackets). Some hook libraries may expect specific formatting; please consult the relevant hook library documentation for details.

User contexts can be specified on either global scope, control socket, basic authentication, or loggers. One other useful feature is the ability to store comments or descriptions; the parser translates a "comment" entry into a user context with the entry, which allows a comment to be attached within the configuration itself.

Basic HTTP authentication protects against unauthorized uses of the control agent by local users. For protection against remote attackers, HTTPS and reverse proxy of Secure Connections provide stronger security.

The authentication is described in the `authentication` block with the mandatory `type` parameter, which selects the authentication. Currently only the basic HTTP authentication (type basic) is supported.

The `realm` authentication parameter is used for error messages when the basic HTTP authentication is required but the client is not authorized.

When the `clients` authentication list is configured and not empty, basic HTTP authentication is required. Each element of the list specifies a user ID and a password. The user ID is mandatory, must not be empty, and must not contain the colon (:) character. The password is optional; when it is not specified an empty password is used.

Note

The basic HTTP authentication user ID and password are encoded in UTF-8, but the current Kea JSON syntax only supports the Latin-1 (i.e. 0x00..0xff) Unicode subset.

To avoid exposing the user ID and/or the associated password, these values can be read from files. The syntax is extended by:

- The `directory` authentication parameter, which handles the common part of file paths. The default value is the empty string.

- The `password-file` client parameter, which, alongside the `directory` parameter, specifies the path of a file that can contain the password, or when no user ID is given, the whole basic HTTP authentication secret.

- The `user-file` client parameter, which, with the `directory` parameter, specifies the path of a file where the user ID can be read.

When files are used, they are read when the configuration is loaded, to detect configuration errors as soon as possible.

Hook libraries can be loaded by `kea-ctrl-agent` in the same way as they are loaded by `kea-dhcp4` and `kea-dhcp6`. The CA currently supports one hook point - `control_command_receive` - which makes it possible to delegate the processing of some commands to the hook library. The `hooks-libraries` list contains the list of hook libraries that should be loaded by `kea-ctrl-agent`, along with their configuration information specified with `parameters`.

Please consult Logging for the details on how to configure logging. The CA's root logger's name is `kea-ctrl-agent`, as given in the example above.

## 8.3. Secure Connections

Configuration options related to Kea Control Agent security can be found in the Secure Kea Control Agent section.

## 8.4. Starting and Stopping the Control Agent

`kea-ctrl-agent` accepts the following command-line switches:

- `-c file` - specifies the configuration file.

- `-d` - specifies whether the agent logging should be switched to debug/verbose mode. In verbose mode, the logging severity and debuglevel specified in the configuration file are ignored and "debug" severity and the maximum debuglevel (99) are assumed. The flag is convenient for temporarily switching the server into maximum verbosity, e.g. when debugging.

- `-t file` - specifies the configuration file to be tested. `kea-netconf` attempts to load it and conducts sanity checks; certain checks are possible only while running the actual server. The actual status is reported with exit code (0 = configuration appears valid, 1 = error encountered). Kea prints out log messages to standard output and error to standard error when testing the configuration.

- `-v` - displays the version of `kea-ctrl-agent` and exits.

- `-V` - displays the extended version information for `kea-ctrl-agent` and exits. The listing includes the versions of the libraries dynamically linked to Kea.

- `-W` - displays the Kea configuration report and exits. The report is a copy of the `config.report` file produced by `meson setup`; it is embedded in the executable binary.

  The contents of the `config.report` file may also be accessed by examining certain libraries in the installation tree or in the source tree.

      # from installation using libkea-process.so
      $ strings ${prefix}/lib/libkea-process.so | sed -n 's/;;;; //p'

      # from sources using libkea-process.so
      $ strings src/lib/process/.libs/libkea-process.so | sed -n 's/;;;; //p'

      # from sources using libkea-process.a
      $ strings src/lib/process/.libs/libkea-process.a | sed -n 's/;;;; //p'

      # from sources using libcfgrpt.a
      $ strings src/lib/process/cfgrpt/.libs/libcfgrpt.a | sed -n 's/;;;; //p'

- `-X` - As of Kea 3.0, disables path and permissions restrictions. The server will emit a warning at startup that sercurity restrictions have been disabled. Do not use this mode of operation without careful consideration and taking any necessary precautions. Failure to do so can expose deployments to security vulnerabilities. For more information please read section Securing a Kea Deployment.

The CA is started by running its binary and specifying the configuration file it should use. For example:

    $ ./kea-ctrl-agent -c /usr/local/etc/kea/kea-ctrl-agent.conf

It can be started by `keactrl` as well (see Managing Kea with keactrl).

## 8.5. Connecting to the Control Agent

For an example of a tool that can take advantage of the RESTful API, see The Kea Shell.