1. Installation

1.1. Hardware requirements

Lease is packaged for a set of supported operating system platforms (see Supported platforms). Any machine (real or virtual) with one of these platforms can be used to run Lease.

DHCP hardware requirements have traditionally been quite modest. For many installations, servers that have been pensioned off from active duty can perform admirably as DHCP servers. For serving a small LAN, even low-performance machines may be sufficient. If the server's operational duties are larger, then a suitably performant machine can be selected.

We aren't able to recommend specifications in this document as it would be outdated quickly. It is best to profile the usage patterns and prepare a hardware configuration accordingly.

Error

TODO: Add a link to Lease support for help with hardware configuration.

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TODO: Add a link to a tuning section.

1.2. Supported platforms

Lease is written to run on POSIX operating systems. The following platforms are supported by this release of Lease:

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 (x86_64)

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 (aarch64)

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 (x86_64)

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 (aarch64)

  • Fedora 42 (x86_64)

  • Fedora 42 (aarch64)

  • Fedora 43 (x86_64)

  • Fedora 43 (aarch64)

  • Debian 12 "bookworm" (amd64)

  • Debian 12 "bookworm" (arm64)

  • Debian 13 "trixie" (amd64)

  • Debian 13 "trixie" (arm64)

  • Debian 13 "trixie" (riscv64)

  • Ubuntu 22.04 LTS "jammy" (amd64)

  • Ubuntu 22.04 LTS "jammy" (arm64)

  • Ubuntu 24.04 LTS "noble" (amd64)

  • Ubuntu 24.04 LTS "noble" (arm64)

  • Ubuntu 24.04 LTS "noble" (riscv64)

Packages for current versions of FreeBSD will be added in the future.

1.3. RPM platforms

Note

Users of AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, and Oracle Linux distributions may use the packages for the corresponding Red Hat Enterprise Linux version.

Installation instructions for each supported platform will be available soon. For now, if you know how to install RPMs using dnf, please adapt the following instructions for your platform.

To install Lease on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 (x86_64), you may run the following commands as the root user.

First, install the akira-release RPM package that will add the akira-epel and akira-epel-testing DNF repositories to your system, as well as associated GPG keys used to verify signed RPM packages from these repositories:</p>

# dnf install https://download.banu.com/packages/akira/1.99/epel/testing/10/x86_64/akira-release-1.99.9.20260214065406.a608344ce2-1.el10.noarch.rpm

Then, enable the akira-epel-testing DNF repository:

# dnf config-manager setopt akira-epel-testing.enabled=1

Then, install the lease RPM package that will install the Lease software and documentation:

# dnf install lease

Then, if you wish to run the DHCP servers, configure them suitably by editing /etc/lease/dhcpd.conf and /etc/lease/dhcpd6.conf, and then run them:

# systemctl enable --now dhcpd
# systemctl enable --now dhcp6

Note

For information about Lease's version numbering, see Lease version numbering scheme. For information about Lease's branches and EOL dates, see Lease branches.

1.4. Debian and Ubuntu platforms

Debian and Ubuntu packages are currently not published in apt repositories. If you would like to use them, please contact us.

1.5. Upgrading

Please read the release notes before upgrading to a newer version of Lease (see the chapter titled Release notes).