Lab 2: Set Up The Jumpbox¶

In this lab, you will set up one of the four machines as a jumpbox. You will use this machine to run commands in this tutorial. While a dedicated machine is used to ensure consistency, you can run these commands from just about any machine, including your personal workstation running macOS or Linux.

Think of the jumpbox as the administration machine you will use as a home base when setting up your Kubernetes cluster from the ground up. One thing you need to do before you get started is to install a few command line utilities and clone the Kubernetes The Hard Way git repository, which contains some additional configuration files that you will use to configure various Kubernetes components throughout this tutorial.

Log in to the jumpbox:

ssh root@jumpbox

For convenience, you will run all commands as the root user, which will help reduce the number of commands required to set everything up.

Install Command Line Utilities¶

Once logged into the jumpbox machine as the root user, you will install the command line utilities that you will use to perform various tasks throughout the tutorial:

sudo dnf -y install wget curl vim openssl git

Sync GitHub Repository¶

Now it is time to download a copy of this tutorial, which contains the configuration files and templates you will use to build your Kubernetes cluster from the ground up. Clone the Kubernetes The Hard Way git repository using the git command:

git clone --depth 1 \
  https://github.com/wsoyinka/kubernetes-the-hard-way.git

Change into the kubernetes-the-hard-way directory:

cd kubernetes-the-hard-way

This will be the working directory for the rest of the tutorial. If you ever get lost, run the pwd command to verify you are in the correct directory when running commands on the jumpbox:

pwd

/root/kubernetes-the-hard-way

Download Binaries¶

Here, you will download the binaries for the various Kubernetes components. Store these binaries in the Downloads directory on the jumpbox. This will reduce the amount of internet bandwidth required to complete this tutorial as you avoid downloading the binaries many times for each machine in our Kubernetes cluster.

The download.txt file lists the binaries you will download, which you can review using the cat command:

cat downloads.txt

Download the binaries listed in the downloads.txt file into a directory called downloads using the wget command:

wget -q --show-progress \
  --https-only \
  --timestamping \
  -P downloads \
  -i downloads.txt

Depending on your internet connection speed, it might take a while to download the 584 megabytes of binaries. Once the download is complete, you can list them using the ls command:

ls -loh downloads

total 557M
-rw-r--r--. 1 root 51M Jan  6 11:13 cni-plugins-linux-amd64-v1.6.2.tgz
-rw-r--r--. 1 root 36M Feb 28 14:09 containerd-2.0.3-linux-amd64.tar.gz
-rw-r--r--. 1 root 19M Dec  9 04:16 crictl-v1.32.0-linux-amd64.tar.gz
-rw-r--r--. 1 root 17M Feb 25 14:19 etcd-v3.4.36-linux-amd64.tar.gz
-rw-r--r--. 1 root 89M Dec 11 16:12 kube-apiserver
-rw-r--r--. 1 root 82M Dec 11 16:12 kube-controller-manager
-rw-r--r--. 1 root 55M Dec 11 16:12 kubectl
-rw-r--r--. 1 root 74M Dec 11 16:12 kubelet
-rw-r--r--. 1 root 64M Dec 11 16:12 kube-proxy
-rw-r--r--. 1 root 63M Dec 11 16:12 kube-scheduler
-rw-r--r--. 1 root 11M Feb 13 20:19 runc.amd64

Install kubectl¶

In this section, you will install the kubectl, the official Kubernetes client command line tool, on the jumpbox machine. You will use kubectl to interact with the Kubernetes control plane after the provisioning of your cluster completes later in this tutorial.

Use the chmod command to make the kubectl binary executable and move it to the /usr/local/bin/ directory:

  chmod +x downloads/kubectl
  cp downloads/kubectl /usr/local/bin/

Since your installation of kubectl is complete, you can verify it by running the kubectl command:

kubectl version --client

Client Version: v1.32.0
Kustomize Version: v5.5.0

At this point, you have set up a jumpbox with all the command-line tools and utilities necessary to complete the labs in this tutorial.

Next: Provisioning Compute Resources

Author: Wale Soyinka

Contributors: Steven Spencer, Ganna Zhyrnova