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Sidero on Raspberry Pi 4

Running Sidero on Raspberry Pi 4 to provision bare-metal servers.

Sidero doesn’t require a lot of computing resources, so SBCs are a perfect fit to run the Sidero management cluster. In this guide, we are going to install Talos on Raspberry Pi4, deploy Sidero and other CAPI components.

Prerequisites

Please see Talos documentation for additional information on installing Talos on Raspberry Pi4.

Download the clusterctl CLI from CAPI releases. The minimum required version is 0.4.3.

Installing Talos

Prepare the SD card with the Talos RPi4 image, and boot the RPi4. Talos should drop into maintenance mode printing the acquired IP address. Record the IP address as the environment variable SIDERO_ENDPOINT:

export SIDERO_ENDPOINT=192.168.x.x

Note: it makes sense to transform DHCP lease for RPi4 into a static reservation so that RPi4 always has the same IP address.

Generate Talos machine configuration for a single-node cluster:

talosctl gen config --config-patch='[{"op": "add", "path": "/cluster/allowSchedulingOnMasters", "value": true},{"op": "replace", "path": "/machine/install/disk", "value": "/dev/mmcblk0"}]' rpi4-sidero https://${SIDERO_ENDPOINT}:6443/

Submit the generated configuration to Talos:

talosctl apply-config --insecure -n ${SIDERO_ENDPOINT} -f controlplane.yaml

Merge client configuration talosconfig into default ~/.talos/config location:

talosctl config merge talosconfig

Update default endpoint and nodes:

talosctl config endpoints ${SIDERO_ENDPOINT}
talosctl config nodes ${SIDERO_ENDPOINT}

You can verify that Talos has booted by running:

$ talosctl version
talosctl version
Client:
    Tag:         v0.10.3
    SHA:         21018f28
    Built:
    Go version:  go1.16.3
    OS/Arch:     linux/amd64

Server:
    NODE:        192.168.0.31
    Tag:         v0.10.3
    SHA:         8f90c6a8
    Built:
    Go version:  go1.16.3
    OS/Arch:     linux/arm64

Bootstrap the etcd cluster:

talosctl bootstrap

At this point, Kubernetes is bootstrapping, and it should be available once all the images are fetched.

Fetch the kubeconfig from the cluster with:

talosctl kubeconfig

You can watch the bootstrap progress by running:

talosctl dmesg -f

Once Talos prints [talos] boot sequence: done, Kubernetes should be up:

kubectl get nodes

Installing Sidero

Install Sidero with host network mode, exposing the endpoints on the node’s address:

SIDERO_CONTROLLER_MANAGER_HOST_NETWORK=true SIDERO_CONTROLLER_MANAGER_API_ENDPOINT=${SIDERO_IP} clusterctl init -i sidero -b talos -c talos

Watch the progress of installation with:

watch -n 2 kubectl get pods -A

Once images are downloaded, all pods should be in running state:

$ kubectl get pods -A
NAMESPACE             NAME                                         READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
cabpt-system          cabpt-controller-manager-6458494888-d7lnm    1/1     Running   0          29m
cacppt-system         cacppt-controller-manager-f98854db8-qgkf9    1/1     Running   0          29m
capi-system           capi-controller-manager-58f797cb65-8dwpz     2/2     Running   0          30m
capi-webhook-system   cabpt-controller-manager-85fd964c9c-ldzb6    1/1     Running   0          29m
capi-webhook-system   cacppt-controller-manager-75c479b7f-5hw89    1/1     Running   0          29m
capi-webhook-system   capi-controller-manager-7d596cc4cb-kjrfk     2/2     Running   0          30m
capi-webhook-system   caps-controller-manager-79664cf677-zqbvw     1/1     Running   0          29m
cert-manager          cert-manager-86cb5dcfdd-v86wr                1/1     Running   0          31m
cert-manager          cert-manager-cainjector-84cf775b89-swk25     1/1     Running   0          31m
cert-manager          cert-manager-webhook-7f9f4f8dcb-29xm4        1/1     Running   0          31m
kube-system           coredns-fcc4c97fb-wkxkg                      1/1     Running   0          35m
kube-system           coredns-fcc4c97fb-xzqzj                      1/1     Running   0          35m
kube-system           kube-apiserver-talos-192-168-0-31            1/1     Running   0          33m
kube-system           kube-controller-manager-talos-192-168-0-31   1/1     Running   0          33m
kube-system           kube-flannel-qmlw6                           1/1     Running   0          34m
kube-system           kube-proxy-j24hg                             1/1     Running   0          34m
kube-system           kube-scheduler-talos-192-168-0-31            1/1     Running   0          33m

Verify Sidero installation and network setup with:

$ curl -I http://${SIDERO_ENDPOINT}:8081/tftp/ipxe.efi
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 1020416
Content-Type: application/octet-stream
Last-Modified: Thu, 03 Jun 2021 15:40:58 GMT
Date: Thu, 03 Jun 2021 15:41:51 GMT

Now Sidero is installed, and it is ready to be used. Configure your DHCP server to PXE boot your bare metal servers from $SIDERO_ENDPOINT (see Bootstrapping guide on DHCP configuration).

Backup and Recovery

SD cards are not very reliable, so make sure you are taking regular etcd backups, so that you can recover your Sidero installation in case of data loss.