Introduction

Thanks to the Techno Tim YouTube channel I was exposed to Rancher, which for me was sensational. Coming from a background of a person who likes Docker but with ZERO knowledge of Kubernetes -- besides from the fact that I knows that it exists and is a container orchestrator -- discovering a solution that reduces the complexity of using Kubernetes and at the same time being a guide to learn it, Rancher appeared at a good time for me to start learning Kubernetes.

Given this background, I wanted to get my hands on tinkering with the system but run it on my Nanopi M4 -- which is, IMO, the card with the best cost/benefit in the offers that use an ARM chip --; however the process documentation was not easy to find, I tried to follow this tutorial for configuring it on an x86; problems arose, the errors were not clear and I was having my first contact with the platform. After a few hours of frustrating paths, a solution was found and the steps were outlined in this Gist.

Step by step

1. Download Armbian -- I used the Bionic server
2. Use an ISO burner to burn the system to an SD Card -- I used balenaEtcher
3. SSH - the password is 1234 -- in your Nanopi with:

   ssh -l root your.boar.ip.here
   

4. Create a user and log in again this time with the password you created in the previous step
5. Check and install updates:

   sudo apt-get update
   sudo apt-get upgrade -y
   

6. Install Docker:

   curl https://get.docker.com | sh
   

7. Follow the steps to add your user to run Docker in superuser mode without having to invoke it
8. Start the Rancher:

   docker run -d --restart=unless-stopped \
    --publish 80:80 \
    --publish 443: 443 \
    --volume /opt/rancher:/var/lib/rancher \
    --volume /lib64:/lib64 \
    --volume /etc /cni/:/etc/cni/ \
    rancher/rancher: v2.4.5-rc7
   

9. Open your browser and enter your Nanopi ip and follow the Rancher settings steps
10. [Extra Step] Always remember when uploading a service, to use Network Provider asFlannel:

Possible Fixes for Some Errors

If you experience problems during or after setup, you can follow these steps:

• Restart your card
• sudo rm -r /etc/kubernetes
• sudo rm -r /var/lib/rancher

To Do

• Write another post on how to set up a Raspberry Pi Zero W with a MagicMirror client running on it and the server on the Rancher configured in this tutorial
• Test on a Raspberry PI 4 and see if the process remains similar
• Test on a Tinker Board
• Build Jenkigs and/or Chef for ARM and see if they run with Rancher

Appendix

I recommend configuring the following services now since Rancher is already running:

1. Heimdall
2. Pi-Hole - particularly I don't know if it works well in this scenario, as I use pfBlocker I didn't see the need to configure it, but if you don't have either, this one it would be a start

References

• "It beggars description." by CarlH_ is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0
• Rancher 2 on Raspberry Pi 4 with RancherOS ARM64 fails to run # 21534
• Running on ARM64 (Experimental)
• rancher/flannel-cni
• Configuring flannel for container networking