Did your kubelet certificate expire in k8s

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For some reason the kublet selfsigned certificate was expired in my cluster. That is the kubelets own API-service, running on port 10250 (i.e. not the client cert that kubelet uses to talk with api-servers). Its supposed to be a self-signed certificate but it was not renewed.

The problem was not very obvious but we saw it when the metrics-service did not work properly. It complained about expired certificates on for port 10250 on nodes.

I could not find any article about how to re-create this certificate. Sure, kubeadm certs has a lot of renewal options, but not for the actual kublet https port as far as I could find out.

The solution showed up to be quite simple. Just remove the two files /var/lib/kubelet/pki/kubelet.crt and /var/lib/kubelet/pki/kubelet.key and restart the kublet service with systemctl restart kublet.

The kubelet will then generate new self-signed certs.

In the end though, this was shown not to be the problem. First, the metrics service deployment needs to be run with the container argument: --kubelet-insecure-tls

at least if the kubelets run with self-signed certs.

Our root problem was that one api-server was running with a faulty proxy settings which caused its internal call to the metrics server to fail.