Fixing expired kubeadm certs

By Connor Taffe | Published .

I had my kubernetes certificate expire as I was publishing the last blog post, and was able to resolve it by following these steps on Fedora with kubeadm:

  1. Confirm they are expired by running

    ; kubeadm certs check-expiration
    
  2. Update the certificates manually by shelling into a control plane node and running:

    ; kubeadm certs renew all
    
  3. Now, upgrade to the next version of kubeadm you can update to. Find your version with:

    ; kubeadm version
    kubeadm version: &version.Info{Major:"1", Minor:"26", GitVersion:"v1.26.9", GitCommit:"d1483fdf7a0578c83523bc1e2212a606a44fd71d", GitTreeState:"clean", BuildDate:"2023-09-13T11:31:28Z", GoVersion:"go1.20.8", Compiler:"gc", Platform:"linux/amd64"}
    

    Then find the last patch version of the next major release:

    ; yum list --disablerepo='*' --enablerepo=kubernetes --showduplicates --disableexcludes=kubernetes
    
  4. Install that version:

    ; sudo yum install -y kubeadm-'1.28.2-*' --disableexcludes=kubernetes
    
  5. Plan an upgrade:

    ; sudo kubeadm upgrade plan
    
  6. Apply the version you installed earlier, even if plan tells you about a later version:

    ; sudo kubeadm upgrade apply v1.26.9
    
  7. Upgrade kubelet:

    ; sudo yum install -y kubelet-'1.26.9-*' kubectl-'1.26.9-*' --disableexcludes=kubernetes
    
  8. On each worker node, install the same version of kubeadm:

    ; sudo yum install -y kubeadm-'1.26.8-*' --disableexcludes=kubernetes
    
  9. Upgrade the node:

    ; sudo kubeadm upgrade node
    
  10. Upgrade kubelet:

    ; sudo yum install -y kubelet-'1.26.9-*' kubectl-'1.26.9-*' --disableexcludes=kubernetes
    
  11. On a control plane node, copy the admin.conf to your user's config:

    ; sudo cp /etc/kubernetes/admin.conf ~/.kube/config
    
  12. Copy the new kube config to your machine for access:

    ; cd ~/.kube
    ; mv config config.bak
    ; rsync k1.home.arpa:~/.kube/config config
    

I also had to run

; sudo dnf remove zram-generator-defaults
; sudo swapoff -a

to permanently disable swap, which was causing kubelet to fail.