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The Repositories of Air-gapped Downstream Clusters in Rancher v2.8.3. fail to pull charts.

This document (000021441) is provided subject to the disclaimer at the end of this document.

Environment

SUSE Rancher v.2.8.3

Situation

There is a bug affecting Rancher v2.8.3 Downstream clusters in AirGapped environments. The Repositories try to pull from " git.rancher.io", when they should be using the bundledSystemCharts (assuming the system-catalog setting's value is "bundled" in the Upstream cluster). This action fails, as the AirGapped clusters do not have connection to the exterior.

Resolution

You can check if you are hitting this issue by running the following command in the Upstream cluster:

kubectl get settings.management.cattle.io system-catalog

If the value is set to "bundled", run the same command on the Downstream Cluster. If the value is empty, that is a confirmation that you hit the issue.

There is a manual workaround available to update the system-catalog setting for Downstream clusters.

  • On Rancher Manager, navigate to the Downstream clusters with the issue.
  • Go to Workloads -> Pods  (with All Namespaces selected in the upper-right dropdown menu).
  • Find the cattle-cluster-agent-######## pod (it is in the cattle-system namespace) -> click on the 3 vertical dots to the right -> Execute Shell
  • Inside this shell, execute:
kubectl edit settings.management.cattle.io system-catalog
  • Change the value to " bundled".

The Repositories should work normally after the change is done and a few minutes pass or you Refresh the repositories.

Cause

The " useBundledSystemChart=true" setting is not being properly shared from upstream to downstream clusters in Rancher v2.8.3. This will cause Downstream Clusters not to contain the "bundled" value for their system-catalog setting. As such, they will try to pull the charts from git.rancher.io. In the case of AirGapped clusters, this will fail, and the fetch action will throw a "Context Deadline Exceeded" error.

Disclaimer

This Support Knowledgebase provides a valuable tool for SUSE customers and parties interested in our products and solutions to acquire information, ideas and learn from one another. Materials are provided for informational, personal or non-commercial use within your organization and are presented "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND.