Setting up Calico

[Niklas2501]

Hey everyone,
I need some help with setting up Calico.

I have tried multiple installation methods:

• Standalone using helm
• Alongside flannel
• Via the Quickstart for Calico on K3s Instruction

Regardless of the installation variant, the following problem always occurs:

• The calico-system pods are running
• But all pods that are created afterwards (e.g. the calico-api-server) show this warning / error and can't be created: "Failed to create pod sandbox: rpc error: code = Unknown desc = failed to setup network for sandbox "[...]": plugin type="calico" failed (add): failed to find plugin "calico" in path [/usr/libexec/cni]"
• Also the claico-node and calico-typha pod have multiple warning messages (see screenshots)

Details on my setup:

• MacOS 12, M1 ARM
• Rancher Desktop Version: 1.6.2
• Kubernetes Version: 1.25.4 and 1.24.8

Does anyone have experience installing Calico with Rancher Desktop?
Are there additional setup steps I need to do in addition to the calico instructions?

Thanks a lot for your help!

[Niklas2501]

Found the problem: It turned out the plugin files were actually missing, even though the init container should have created them imo.

As a fix you can manually add the files (needs to be done every time the cluster restarts) - maybe there is a smarter solution but it works:

rdctl shell sudo curl --no-progress-meter -L -o /usr/libexec/cni/calico https://github.com/projectcalico/cni-plugin/releases/download/v3.14.0/calico-arm64
rdctl shell sudo curl --no-progress-meter -L -o /usr/libexec/cni/calico-ipam https://github.com/projectcalico/cni-plugin/releases/download/v3.14.0/calico-ipam-arm64

rdctl shell sudo chmod 755 /usr/libexec/cni/calico
rdctl shell sudo chmod 755 /usr/libexec/cni/calico-ipam

I got the links for the binaries from https://projectcalico.docs.tigera.io/getting-started/kubernetes/hardway/install-cni-plugin
Be aware that one might need to change amd64 to arm64 in the links listed there.