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Exercise 1 — Connecting to Your Nodes

Each table should have a note with:

  • Raspberry Pi IP addresses
  • SSH login credentials
  • WiFi credentials for the tutorial router

You will also need to connect your laptop to our Router - TP-Link_AP_2A5A_01

Warning

While connected to the tutorial router, your laptop will lose internet access. You might want to have kubectl installed locally before connecting to the router.

Verify SSH Access

Once you have connected to the router, as a group you should confirm you can connect to each node:

ssh chef@192.168.x.xxx
hostname
exit

For convenience, you may want to add IP-hostname pairs to /etc/hosts/ on your own device:

192.168.x.xxx    kmaster
192.168.x.yyy    kworker1

Then, you can simply ssh <username>@kmaster etc. instead of having to remember each IP address, as we do below. Alternatively, configure SSH aliases in ~/.ssh/config, e.g.

Host kworker01
    HostName 192.168.x.yyy
    User chef
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_ed25519

Then connect to the desired node with ssh kworker01

Optional: Configure SSH Keys

To avoid repeatedly entering passwords you can setup SSH keys to make login more streamlined:

ssh-keygen -t ed25519
ssh-copy-id chef@kmaster

Repeat for each node if desired.

Verify Node Interconnectivity

Check the worker nodes are reachable from the control node:

ssh chef@kmaster
ping -c3 192.168.x.yyy

Troubleshooting

The Pis should be configured static IPs through our router's DHCP settings. However, if a node is unreachable we will need to:

  • Check the node is powered on
  • Verify the IP address
  • Confirm sshd is running
  • Check a static IP has been configured using nmcli or nmtui.

If needed, ask one of the course facilitators to help by connecting the Raspberry Pi to a display and keyboard for debugging