How to Connect to Rancher Provisioned Clusters using CLI When Rancher is Offline

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Environment

Rancher Version : Applicable for all Rancher versions.

Downstream clusters : RKE1 , RKE2 or K3S

Standalone Clusters : Its applicable for Standalone clusters of RKE1 , RKE2 or K3S

SSH access to the ControlPlane nodes are mandatory.

Situation

In the event of a Rancher application outage, administrators may need to directly access provisioned downstream clusters via command-line interface (CLI) tools to diagnose and resolve issues.

Resolution

RKE2 :

SSH to the Server Node ( Privileged access is required )
Run the Below Command

# export CRI_CONFIG_FILE=/var/lib/rancher/rke2/agent/etc/crictl.yaml KUBECONFIG=/etc/rancher/rke2/rke2.yaml
# PATH=$PATH:/var/lib/rancher/rke2/bin

To verify, check the "crictl" and "kubectl" access to the cluster from the Server node.

K3S :

SSH to the Server Node ( Privileged access is required )
Run the Below Command

# export CRI_CONFIG_FILE=/var/lib/rancher/k3s/agent/etc/crictl.yaml KUBECONFIG=/etc/rancher/k3s/k3s.yaml
# PATH=$PATH:/var/lib/rancher/k3s/agent/containerd/bin/

To verify, check the "crictl" and "kubectl" access to the cluster from the Server node.

RKE1 :

SSH to the Server Node ( Privileged access is required )
Follow the GH article to retrieve kubeconfig file
To verify, check the "docker" and "kubectl" access to the cluster from the Server node.

Cause

Status

Top Issue

Additional Information

Refer for RKE2 : https://docs.rke2.io/cluster_access

Refer for K3S : https://docs.k3s.io/cluster-access

Disclaimer

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