ubuntu – Page 3 – Kev's Development Toolbox

May 15, 2019May 15, 2019

Installing a desktop on Ubuntu 18.04 server

Ubuntu 18.04 Server does not come with a desktop by default, but any of the normally available desktops can be installed with the tasksel util.

sudo apt-get install tasksel

List available desktop installations (and other installs/collection of packages):

tasksel --list-tasks

Select required desktop from displayed list and install, e.g.:

sudo tasksel install lubuntu-desktop

Wait for install to complete, reboot, done.

December 2, 2018December 3, 2018

Rancher RKE Kubernetes install notes

Rancher’s RKE is a Kubernetes cluster installer – see more here.

Pre-reqs:

Docker must be running on the client machine where you are going to run the rke setup tool
The docs are not obvious, but the rke tool is run on a client machine to provision your cluster, it is not run on any of the target cluster nodes

Notes using Ubuntu 16.04 server.

Remove prior Docker installs:

sudo apt-get remove docker docker-engine docker.io

Create docker group and add user to docker group:

sudo groupadd docker
usermod -aG docker <user_name>

Install per Docker CE install steps here, or use the Rancher provider install script here.

Supported Docker versions for RKE (as of Dec 2018) are: 1.11.x 1.12.x 1.13.x 17.03.x

Configure Docker daemon to listen for incoming requests on 2376, as per steps here.

Using ‘rke config’ with the default/minimal cluster.yml here, and then install/setup with ‘rke up’

If you didn’t change the name of the cluster.yml file, after the install is complete, you’ll have a kube_config_cluster.yml file in the same dir which you can use with kubectl to interact with you cluster, or add it into your existing ~/.kube/config file

November 23, 2018November 23, 2018

Checking iptables filtering for bridge networking on Ubuntu (for Kubernetes setup)

If you’re installing and configuring a Kubernetes cluster on bare metal or in a VM yourself, one of the install steps using kubeadm says to check iptables filtering for bridge networking, but it doesn’t exactly say how to do this per distro.

The setting required is:

net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-iptables=1

There are specific steps in the kubadm docs above for RHEL/CentOS to add this setting. For Ubuntu it seems this is set by default, but you can confirm by:

sysctl net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-iptables

and the expected setting is 1:

net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-iptables = 1

It seems on Ubuntu 16.04 server this is set to 1 by default, but if it’s 0, you can edit this property in /etc/sysctl.conf

June 18, 2018

Increasing VMware ESXi guest desktop resolution for Ubuntu 14.04

By default, my Ubuntu 14.04 desktop guest running under VMware ESXi has a maximum resolution of 1360×768 when accessed with the Remote Client, which although usable is not great on my MacBook Pro:

In the guest settings for my Ubuntu guest, I have rather limited graphics settings:

I tried bumping up the memory and see if that opens up some additional settings but that didn’t change anything, although for higher resolutions it’s most likely I would need more gpu memory, but that’s not the issue with the limited settings here.

Searching for ‘ESXi linux guest maximum resolution’ I found this article:

https://communities.vmware.com/thread/527747

which suggests to install a ‘desktop’ version of the open-vm-tools:

sudo apt-get install open-vm-tools-desktop

Let’s try that. After a reboot, now we’ve got higher resolutions! Awesome!