For work, I often have to connect to a Kubernetes cluster to manage resources, and anyone who’s done that via CLI before knows about the kubectl command. To use it locally, you must first download a yaml configuration file to identify the cluster, namespace, etc., then the commands should work. Notice I said “should” work.

So enter the following error message when attempting to run kubectl get pods:

Unable to connect to the server: dial tcp 127.0.0.1:8080: connectex: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it.

Obviously I wasn’t wanting to connect to 127.0.0.1 (aka localhost), I was trying to connect to an enterprise Kubernetes cluster. Then later on after re-downloading the target cluster yaml file, I received this error while running kubectl commands:

Unable to connect to the server: EOF

Searching for this error online led me down a multitude of rabbit holes, each as unhelpful as the last, until I found a reference to Docker Desktop. I know that we (the company I work for) used to use it, but we don’t anymore. (At least I don’t in my current role.)

I raised my eyebrow at that one — I had a relatively new laptop, but one of the corporate-loaded tools on it for someone in my role was Docker Desktop. I checked the running services to see if it was running, and it was not, which is expected. I don’t need to run it.

I forgot to mention that I am using WSL2 (Fedora remix) as my VS Code terminal shell, and so far I’m nothing but happy with it. Sensing something off with my local installation of kubectl I ran which kubectl, which gives me the location of the binary currently in my path. (For the record if it appears more than once in your path, it only returns the first one it comes across, in order of your PATH paths.)

Sure enough, it pointed to /usr/local/bin/kubectl, which was unexpected. I wouldn’t think that an enterprise tool would be installed to /usr/local, and I was right. Performing a long listing of that directory showed me the following:

lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root   55 Jul 21 09:43 kubectl -> /mnt/wsl/docker-desktop/cli-tools/usr/local/bin/kubectl

So sure enough, I had been running the Docker desktop version of kubectl and not the one I had installed with yum officially (which existed in /usr/bin, but was after /usr/local in my PATH.)

So I removed the link, and now which kubectl immediately started showing the correct one, installed via the package manager, and it starting working, connecting to the correct cluster, and everything. While this may have been a simple fix for some, not being fully aware of what may be pre-installed on a work laptop did give me some surprises.