Troubleshoot_Spire_Failing_to_Start_on_NCNs.md

Troubleshoot Spire Failing to Start on NCNs

The spire-agent service may fail to start on Kubernetes non-compute nodes (NCNs). A key indication of this failure is when logging errors occur with the journalctl command. The following are logging errors that will indicate if the spire-agent is failing to start:

• The join token does not exist or has already been used message is returned
• The last lines of the logs contain multiple lines of systemd[1]: spire-agent.service: Start request repeated too quickly.

Deleting the request-ncn-join-token daemonset pod running on the node may clear the issue.

While the spire-agent systemctl service on the Kubernetes node should eventually restart cleanly, administrators may need to log in to the impacted nodes and restart the service. The easiest way to delete the appropriate pod is to create the following function and run it on the impacted node.

function renewncnjoin() {
    if [ -z "$1" ]; then echo "usage: renewncnjoin NODE_HOSTNAME"
    else
        for pod in $(kubectl get pods -n spire | grep request-ncn-join-token | awk '{print $1}');
        do
            if kubectl describe -n spire pods $pod | grep -q "Node:.*$1";
            then echo "Restarting $pod running on $1"; kubectl delete -n spire pod "$pod";
            fi
        done
    fi
}

Run the renewncnjoin function on the NCN where kubectl is running:

renewncnjoin NODE_HOSTNAME

The spire-agent service may also fail if an NCN was powered off for too long and its tokens expired. If this happens, delete /root/spire/agent_svid.der, /root/spire/bundle.der, and /root/spire/data/svid.key off the NCN before deleting the request-ncn-join-token daemonset pod.

rm /root/spire/agent_svid.der
rm /root/spire/bundle.der
rm /root/spire/data/svid.key