↓Skip to main content
Zhang Tai

Using RKE2

·458 words·3 mins

I used to setup my homelab kubernetes cluster with Rancher and rke, both are products of Rancher. Honestly I haven’t spent too much time on both. Until recently I want to setup kubernetes cluster, again. So I goto Rancher’s website found that they have another product: RKE2.

It’s easy to setup just follow the RKE2 official installation guide. Here is summary of my installtion manually, I opened a tmux session with 4 panes, one for server, 3 for agents. Each has 4 cores, 8GB RAM 160GB storage, they are VMs running on a host of ESXi instance.

Server
# 

# Add proxy only if you have such dependency
curl -sfL https://get.rke2.io | sudo https_proxy=http://192.168.3.1:8889 INSTALL_RKE2_CHANNEL=latest sh -

sudo bash -c 'cat > /etc/default/rke2-server <<EOF
CONTAINERD_HTTP_PROXY=http://192.168.3.1:8889
CONTAINERD_HTTPS_PROXY=http://192.168.3.1:8889
CONTAINERD_NO_PROXY=127.0.0.0/8,10.0.0.0/8,172.16.0.0/12,192.168.0.0/16,.svc,.cluster.local
EOF'

# Or
sudo bash -c 'cat > /usr/local/lib/systemd/system/rke2-server.env <<EOF
HOME=/root
HTTP_PROXY=http://192.168.3.1:8889
HTTPS_PROXY=http://192.168.3.1:8889
NO_PROXY=127.0.0.0/8,10.0.0.0/8,172.16.0.0/12,192.168.0.0/16,.svc,.cluster.local
EOF'

sudo systemctl enable rke2-server.service

sudo systemctl start rke2-server.service
# sudo journalctl -u rke2-server -f
sudo cat /var/lib/rancher/rke2/server/node-token

# save /etc/rancher/rke2/rke2.yaml as token to communicate with cluster api

On Proxmox
#

Although it’s not good to install on Proxmox instead of VM inside it, for POC purpose I tried to installed it on Proxmox. Below line is required to add to /etc/network/interfaces, under auto vmbr0 section.

Restart network with /etc/init.d/networking restart or with systemd restart networking.

up ip route add default via 192.168.3.1 dev vmbr0

Remote connect via frp
#

The default connection string is generated for LAN connection(of course), but when connecting from remote from home, you need to expose the API server https port, for example I am using frp.

/etc/rancher/rke2/config.yaml

tls-san:
  - "<frp-server-id>"

frpc.ini

[kubernetes-api]
type = tcp
local_ip = 192.168.1.3
local_port = 6443
remote_port = 6443

rke2.yaml

# ...
    server: https://120.24.177.213:16443
# ...

Agent
# 

sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y nfs-common
curl -sfL https://get.rke2.io | sudo https_proxy=http://192.168.3.1:8889 INSTALL_RKE2_TYPE="agent" INSTALL_RKE2_CHANNEL=latest sh -
sudo systemctl enable rke2-agent.service
sudo mkdir -p /etc/rancher/rke2/

sudo bash -c 'cat > /etc/default/rke2-agent <<EOF
CONTAINERD_HTTP_PROXY=http://192.168.3.1:8889
CONTAINERD_HTTPS_PROXY=http://192.168.3.1:8889
CONTAINERD_NO_PROXY=127.0.0.0/8,10.0.0.0/8,172.16.0.0/12,192.168.0.0/16,.svc,.cluster.local
EOF'

sudo bash -c 'cat > /etc/rancher/rke2/config.yaml <<EOF
server: https://192.168.3.10:9345
token: <token from server node>
EOF'

sudo systemctl start rke2-agent.service

StorageClass: NFS
#

https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/nfs-subdir-external-provisioner

helm repo add nfs-subdir-external-provisioner https://kubernetes-sigs.github.io/nfs-subdir-external-provisioner/
helm install nfs-subdir-external-provisioner nfs-subdir-external-provisioner/nfs-subdir-external-provisioner \
    --set nfs.server=192.168.3.2 \
    --set nfs.path=/k8s-pv

StorageClass: Longhorn
#

Just install according to the official guide, add ingress hostname if you want to access the dashboard by domain.

helm repo add longhorn https://charts.longhorn.io
helm repo update
helm install longhorn longhorn/longhorn \
  --namespace longhorn-system \
  --create-namespace

spec:
  rules:
    - host: longhorn.lan
      http:
        paths:
          # ...

Installation

USER=<USERNAME_HERE>
PASSWORD=<PASSWORD_HERE>
echo "${USER}:$(openssl passwd -stdin -apr1 <<< ${PASSWORD})" >> auth

kubectl -n longhorn-system apply -f longhorn-ingress.yml

Install Jenkins
# 

helm install jenkins jenkins/jenkins \
  --set persistence.storageClassName="longhorn" \
  --set persistence.size="16Gi" \
  --set controller.ingress.enabled=true \
  --set controller.ingress.hostName="jenkins.lan" \
  --namespace jenkins \
  --create-namespace