Hey all, We would like to add a custom tolerations in cattle-cluster-agent deployment for a user added taint in node, so we are exactly hitting this issue - https://github.com/rancher/rancher/issues/16050 Saw the work around :

An empty key with operator Exists matches all keys, values and effects which means this will tolerate everything.
tolerations:
- operator: "Exists"

and

kubectl -n cattle-system patch ds/cattle-node-agent -p '{"spec":{"template":{"spec":{"tolerations":[{"operator":"Exists"}]}}}}'

do you think that the first code snippet can be added to the cattle-cluster-agent deployment manifest or it will work only with kubectl patch? We would like to make this persist with code. Please let us know if we really can add a toleration to cattle-cluster-agent deployment manifest, thank you 🙇

What version of Rancher are you running? A controller was added to watch the control plane of a downstream cluster and dynamically add tolerations to the agent deployment.

2.6.9 version! We have a taint (own taint or created by ourselves) in a node and want to run agent on that specific nodes. The GitHub issue link which I shjared above has a workaround, is it possible to use that wild card toleration in a deployment manifest or some another way instead of kubectl patch command.

The cluster agent, with few exceptions, runs on the control plane. Node affinities and tolerations are added to the deployment to achieve this goal. Using a taint/toleration will allow the agent to run on the node you want it to, but it won’t always achieve that goal. Node affinities tell Kubernetes that you want a deployment to run on a specific node. I think that is what you’re after. As far as your question of whether a configuration in Rancher allows you to specify an affinity for the cluster agent, I’m not sure. Digging into Rancher’s helm chart is the only way I know to find this out.

thanks Donnie