Rancher Suite K8S Adventure - Chapter 005 - Ubuntu 20.04 install on a Beelink Mini S 5095

Rancher Suite K8S Adventure - Chapter 005 - Ubuntu 20.04 install on a Beelink Mini S 5095

A travelogue of converting from OpenStack to Suse's Rancher Suite for K8S including RKE2, Harvester, kubectl, helm.

I do all installs using MatterMost Playbooks, this particular example is named "Bare Metal Ubuntu 20".  Life is easier with MatterMost.  When I figure out a convenient way to share Mattermost playbooks I'll add a link here.  If you've never used this software, you're missing out... I would describe it as similar to Slack meets an outline oriented todo app.

https://mattermost.com/

Hardware

The hardware I selected for my three node Rancher RKE2 cluster is Beelink Mini S 5095.  It's considerably cheaper than a Raspberry Pi, easier to get, Intel CPU based, much faster, much more storage, sadly the Raspberry Pi platform has been eliminated from the market by heavy competition and supply chain problems.  The Raspberry Pi was cool tech, for it's day, but its unavailable and/or too expensive now.  The Beelink is simply a mini size PC.  This particular model seems very popular in the set top box media player subculture, often used as a Plex or Emby front end instead of using Roku-type hardware.

https://www.bee-link.com/beelink-mini-s-n5095-mini-pc

BIOS configuration was uneventful.

Hit Del while booting to enter BIOS setup

Menu "Main" - Set hwclock to UTC time

Menu "Advanced" "MAC whatever IPv4 Network Configuration" - Configured Enabled, Enable DHCP

"Security" "Secure Boot" "Disable"

"Boot" - Setup Prompt Timeout change from 1 to 3, Quiet Boot Disabled

"Save and Exit" - "Save and Reset"

Reboot, hit del again to enter setup again (can't save and do a pxeboot in the same step, don't know why, doesn't really matter in the long run)

"Save and Exit" Boot Override "UEFI PXE"

I have a netboot.xyz installation on the LAN so I can PXE boot for OS installations.

https://netboot.xyz/

An example of how to configure the ISC DHCP server for PXE based netboot.xyz:

https://gitlab.com/SpringCitySolutionsLLC/dhcp/-/blob/master/header.dhcpd.conf.dhcp11

Likewise, if you use OpenStack and its HEAT template system, you can install netboot.xyz on Zun container service using this example:

https://gitlab.com/SpringCitySolutionsLLC/openstack-scripts/-/blob/master/projects/infrastructure/netbootxyz/netbootxyz.yml

OS

The Ubuntu 20.04 install was mostly uneventful, aside from the usual annoyances revolving around timezones settings, avoiding DHCP incorrect autoconfiguration, etc.  It's the usual Ubuntu experience.

In the Netboot.xyz menu: "Linux Network Installs (64-bit)"

"Ubuntu"

"Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa (Legacy)"

Don't use: "Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa (Subiquity)" - Install seems to hang at "hdaudio hdaudioCOD2: Unable to bind the codec"

"Install"

Reasonable defaults as usual

Full name for the new user: Ubuntu

Password for ubuntu user is "the standard LAN password", doesn't matter the username will be deleted after ansible connects it to AD anyway.

Force timezone to "Central" I don't live in Chicago LOL

The only software to install is OpenSSH server

Note that upon bootup it looks like a failed boot but ctrl-alt-f1 etc will work, very annoying.

Super annoying that it autoconfigures the enp2s0 ethernet as DHCP with no option to change. You can crash out of the DHCP setting and enter manual config mode.  If that fails and it installs in DHCP mode (super annoying) then:

boot, log in as ubuntu, sudo vi /etc/netplan/01-netcfg.yaml and do something like this:

network:
  version: 2
  renderer: networkd
  ethernets:
    enp2s0:
      dhcp4: no
      addresses: [10.10.20.71/16]
      gateway4: 10.10.1.1
      nameservers:
        addresses: [10.10.7.3,10.10.7.4]

Then a quick "sudo netplan apply" and "ip addr" to verify and of course ssh in over the LAN to verify.

sudo reboot now

There is some weird bug where Ubuntu looks like the boot failed but as soon as you hit C-A-F1 you see a login, who knows.  Weird text console bug at bootup doesn't seem to matter.

verify SSH works over the lan as the ubuntu user which ansible will bootstrap into an AD connection

sudo shutdown now

At this point I physically installed the new server in the data center rack.  Properly label ethernet cables on both sides using the BradyLabel model 41 (yeah, its a bit of a brag, I really like this label maker), update the port name so the Observium installation makes pretty graphs with the correct server name, all the usual tasks.

Here is a link to the Ansible playbook for rancher1.  There's nothing special or unusual about it, its just a very small desktop PC being configured into a server.

https://gitlab.com/SpringCitySolutionsLLC/ansible/-/blob/master/playbooks/rancher1.yml

At this point the server is completely integrated in my infrastructure, although no "K8S specific" software has been installed.  AD SSO works, NTP works, Elasticsearch logging and metrics work, Zabbix monitoring works, etc.