Gah, ImagePullBackOff with Calico CNI running on Kubernetes

Whilst deploying Calico Node etc. to my cluster, via: -

kubectl apply -f calico.yaml

and whilst checking the running Pods, via: -

kubectl get pods -A

I was seeing: -

...

kube-system   calico-node-9srv6                         0/1     Init:ErrImagePull   0          8s

...

I dug into that failing Pod with: -

kubectl describe pod calico-node-9srv6 --namespace kube-system

which showed: -

...

  Type     Reason   Age                    From                   Message

  ----     ------   ----                   ----                   -------

  Normal   BackOff  17m (x303 over 88m)    kubelet, 50c933ad26be  Back-off pulling image "us.icr.io/davehay/calico/cni:latest-s390x"

  Warning  Failed   2m56s (x368 over 88m)  kubelet, 50c933ad26be  Error: ImagePullBackOff

...

Now I knew that it wasn't an authentication issue, as my YAML was also defining a Secret, as per my previous post: -

Argh, Kubernetes and YAML hell

and had defined that Secret within the YAML, using: -

...

imagePullSecrets:

- name: my_secret

...

So why wasn't it working .... ?

And then it struck me .... DOH!

My Pod is running inside the kube-system Namespace ....

You know where I'm going with this, am I right ?

Yes, my Secret was NOT inside the same kube-system Namespace, but was in default.

Once I updated my YAML to redefine my Secret: -

...

apiVersion: v1

kind: Secret

data:

  .dockerconfigjson:

    <HERE'S THE BASE64 ENCODED STUFF>

metadata:

  name: my_secret

  namespace: kube-system

type: kubernetes.io/dockerconfigjson

...

re-applied the YAML, and deleted the failing Pod, all was well