Bootstrapping a highly available Kubernetes cluster on bare-metal usually involves setting up a Virtual IP (VIP) that floats between control plane nodes. My tool of choice for this is kube-vip. But recently, while bootstrapping a fresh Debian 13 cluster on Kubernetes 1.29+, I ran into a complete deadlock.
What do you do when your automated deployment pipeline throws an UNREACHABLE error on a machine that you can successfully SSH into? This is the exact scenario I faced recently when bringing up a third worker node in my bare-metal Kubernetes cluster.
One of the most frustrating alerts in Kubernetes operations is seeing a node drop to a NotReady or NodeStatusUnknown state. When you run kubectl describe node, the only clue you get is:
Kubelet stopped posting node status.
Where do you even begin to look when the primary node agent dies silently?