Quick Start Guide for Installing Ascender on K3s

Introduction

This guide will have you setup and run Ascender on a K3s cluster.

Problem

Many customers face difficulties when managing their infrastructure at scale. This is where Ascender comes in to ensure scalable patching, security hardening and more across your fleet.

Symptoms

A new user may encounter difficulties installing Ascender onto their K3s cluster.

Resolution

Prerequisites

• Same OS family as Rocky Linux. Rocky Linux 8.x or Rocky Linux 9.x is recommended as the base OS.

• System requirements:

  • CPUs: 2

  • Memory: 8GB (if installing both Ascender and Ledger)

  • Disk: 20GB (if installing both Ascender and Ledger)

• Internet access for the K3s cluster.

• Perform the below steps with a user that has privilege escalation. Do not use the root user account.

Setup

• Update the node running K3s:

sudo dnf update -y

• Install git:

sudo dnf install -y git

• Allow these ports in firewalld:

sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-port=22/tcp
sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-port=80/tcp
sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-port=443/tcp
sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-port=5432/tcp
sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-port=5895/tcp
sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-port=5986/tcp
sudo firewall-cmd --reload

• Clone the Ascender repository:

git clone https://github.com/ctrliq/ascender-install.git

• Navigate to the installation directory:

cd ascender-install

• Run the config_vars.sh script:

./config_vars.sh

• The script will present you with multiple questions. Answer each of them according to how you want to set up your Ascender environment and if you already have K3s installed on your node.

• Run the setup script to install Ascender:

sudo ./setup.sh

• Once complete, the final playbook recap will look like the following example:

PLAY RECAP *************************************************************************************************************************
ascender_host              : ok=14   changed=6    unreachable=0    failed=0    skipped=2    rescued=0    ignored=0
localhost                  : ok=72   changed=27   unreachable=0    failed=0    skipped=4    rescued=0    ignored=0

ASCENDER SUCCESSFULLY SETUP

Accessing Ascender

• You can access Ascender directly via the internal CLUSTER IP address.

Notes

• To monitor the Ascender setup on your K3s cluster during install:

kubectl get pod -n ascender -w

• For further details surrounding particular pods:

kubectl describe pod -n ascender [pod name]

References & related articles

Ascender General Prerequisites Ascender K3s Install Guide