02-jumpbox.md

Set Up The Jumpbox

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

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

Log in to the jumpbox:

ssh root@jumpbox

All commands will be run as the root user. This is being done for the sake of convenience, and will help reduce the number of commands required to set everything up.

Install Command Line Utilities

Now that you are logged into the jumpbox machine as the root user, you will install the command line utilities that will be used to preform various tasks throughout the tutorial.

{
  apt-get update
  apt-get -y install wget curl vim openssl git
}

Sync GitHub Repository

Now it's time to download a copy of this tutorial which contains the configuration files and templates that will be used 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/kelseyhightower/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 right directory when running commands on the jumpbox:

pwd

/root/kubernetes-the-hard-way

Download Binaries

In this section you will download the binaries for the various Kubernetes components. The binaries will be stored in the downloads directory on the jumpbox, which will reduce the amount of internet bandwidth required to complete this tutorial as we avoid downloading the binaries multiple times for each machine in our Kubernetes cluster.

The binaries that will be downloaded are listed in the downloads.txt file, 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 may take a while to download over 500 megabytes of binaries, and once the download is complete, you can list them using the ls command:

ls -oh downloads

total 544M
-rw-r--r-- 1 root 48M Jan  6 08:13 cni-plugins-linux-arm64-v1.6.2.tgz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root 34M Mar 17 19:33 containerd-2.1.0-beta.0-linux-arm64.tar.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root 17M Dec  9 01:16 crictl-v1.32.0-linux-arm64.tar.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root 21M Mar 27 16:15 etcd-v3.6.0-rc.3-linux-arm64.tar.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root 87M Mar 11 20:31 kube-apiserver
-rw-r--r-- 1 root 80M Mar 11 20:31 kube-controller-manager
-rw-r--r-- 1 root 54M Mar 11 20:31 kubectl
-rw-r--r-- 1 root 72M Mar 11 20:31 kubelet
-rw-r--r-- 1 root 63M Mar 11 20:31 kube-proxy
-rw-r--r-- 1 root 62M Mar 11 20:31 kube-scheduler
-rw-r--r-- 1 root 11M Mar  4 04:14 runc.arm64

Install kubectl

In this section you will install the kubectl, the official Kubernetes client command line tool, on the jumpbox machine. kubectl will be used to interact with the Kubernetes control plane once your cluster is provisioned 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/
}

At this point kubectl is installed and can be verified by running the kubectl command:

kubectl version --client

Client Version: v1.32.3
Kustomize Version: v5.5.0

At this point the jumpbox has been set up with all the command line tools and utilities necessary to complete the labs in this tutorial.

Next: Provisioning Compute Resources