As you have noticed I continue to trail off the paved path of the technically inclined blog and venture into hiking/mountaineering Internet backcountry. The reason is I’m an extremely lazy guy who promised to get back to Shasta almost a year ago. It’s time to be back as promised!

Why this post in this blog? - I am generally trying to keep this blog technically inclined. Researching information on one day mt. Whitney hike I was able to find bits of useful information here and there but no ‘end-to-end product’ so to say. This post is an attempt to decrease amount of googling you need to do. Plus doing this hike in one day wasn’t a cakewalk so quite naturally I need to brag a bit, please bear with me.

Disclaimer - use the information as well as anything you find on the Internet as a baseline. Mountaineering is an inherently dangerous activity. Be prepared, be cautious and be lucky. No book or Internet publication is able to provide you with a hands on experience.

Recently I was investigating quite an interesting issue - there is Ubuntu based VM our testers run some tests on. It was reported they’re unable to log into the virtual machine.

After a brief investigation it became clear the issue is not network or SSH key related.

These are records from auth log:

/var/log/auth.log

Feb 28 20:21:39 test-instance sshd[21954]: pam_unix(sshd:session): session opened for user ubuntu by (uid=0)
Feb 28 20:21:39 test-instance systemd-logind[756]: New session 75 of user ubuntu.
Feb 28 20:21:39 test-instance sshd[21954]: fatal: fork of unprivileged child failed
Feb 28 20:21:39 test-instance systemd-logind[756]: Removed session 75.

Quite an obscure error message, but smells like cgroup problem. Indeed:

There is an annoying bug in Kubernetes 1.6 running on GCE with Calico/Flannel networking operating via CNI plugin interface.

You may experience same issue if kubelet on your nodes runs with options

--network-plugin=cni --cloud-provider=gce

When a new node is added to the k8s cluster it’s recognized as ‘Ready’ but no pods except Calico/Flannel pod are being scheduled there.

Sup guys I’m back and I have something for you nerdy hikers. If you’re impatient enough please feel free to skip to the bottom of the post to get the details.

Few weeks ago I’ve made an attempt to summit mt. Shasta in northern California - from Bunny flats, via Horse camp, 50/50, Helen lake, Red banks. Reached the bottom of Misery hill (4km point) and turned back.