Hello everyone! 🙂 Just have a couple of quick (and probably silly newb) questions around the Rancher Cluster agent on Rancher 2.6 when running against a generic imported k3s cluster. 1. How do the agents authenticate themselves with the Rancher server during setup and then once they are running please? It’s not completely clear from the docs here: https://rancher.com/docs/rancher/v2.6/en/overview/architecture/#2-cluster-controllers-and-cluster-agents 2. Also, does Rancher handle upgrades of cluster and fleet agents on each downstream cluster itself or is that something we need to handle as part of regular operations? Thanks in advance!

Good questions. 1. When you import a cluster into Rancher, you run a kubectl command on the downstream cluster which installs the cluster agent. This same command gives the cluster agent a token. The agent then initiates communication with Rancher which is authenticated with that token. You might also pass the token or other advanced option to the cluster agent if you ever want to join a new node to a custom cluster, that is, a cluster with preexisting nodes. (https://rancher.com/docs/rancher/v2.6/en/cluster-provisioning/rke-clusters/custom-nodes/agent-options/) 2. Yes, rancher handles upgrades of the agents.

Ah great! Thanks for the info @tall-school-18125 - much appreciated. 🙂