Accessing The Windows Node

The Windows Node is installed with Windows Server 2019 Datacenter. This installation does NOT include the familiar Windows UI. Also, since we are on AWS, RDP isn’t enabled anyway. So how do you access the Windows Node?

The same way as you do Linux nodes: SSH

Logging into your node

This demo/quickstart deployed an "ssh container" so that you can ssh into this host. Verify that it’s running.

oc get pods -l app=winc-ssh -n openshift-windows-machine-config-operator

NAME                        READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
winc-ssh-6b7f87bf75-cdcw2   1/1     Running   0          27m

This host has everything needed in order to ssh into your Windows Node. First, get the hostname of your Windows Node. For example:

oc get nodes -l kubernetes.io/os=windows

NAME                         STATUS   ROLES    AGE   VERSION
ip-10-0-138-9.ec2.internal   Ready    worker   14m   v1.21.1-1398+98073871f173b

Then, you can rsh into this container with the following command:

oc -n openshift-windows-machine-config-operator rsh deploy/winc-ssh

This will give you a shell prompt:

sh-4.4$

You can then run the ssh script (built into the container) providing the Windows Node nodename as an argument. Example:

sh-4.4$ sshcmd.sh ip-10-0-138-9.ec2.internal

This should drop you into a PowerShell session

Windows PowerShell
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

PS C:\Users\Administrator>

Exploring the Node

Once you are in, you can see that the docker process is running.

PS C:\Users\Administrator> docker ps
CONTAINER ID        IMAGE               COMMAND             CREATED             STATUS              PORTS               NAMES

You can also see the Kubernetes processes, and the network overlay running on the Windows Node.

Get-Process | ?{ $_.ProcessName -match "kube|overlay|docker" }

PS C:\Users\Administrator> Get-Process | ?{ $_.ProcessName -match "kube|overlay|docker" }

Handles  NPM(K)    PM(K)      WS(K)     CPU(s)     Id  SI ProcessName
-------  ------    -----      -----     ------     --  -- -----------
    307      19    62876      44124     124.34   2524   0 dockerd
    229      16    35112      43112     173.63   4344   0 hybrid-overlay-node
    379      25    45636      70860      40.95    984   0 kubelet
    249      22    30048      41404   1,325.14   3408   0 kube-proxy

These are the main components needed to run a Windows Node. Remember that this node is managed the same way as RHCOS, via the platform; so you won’t have to do much with this Windows Node.

The base Windows Server docker image has been prepulled for you. You should be able to see it by running the docker images command in the PowerShell prompt.

PS C:\Users\Administrator> docker images
REPOSITORY                             TAG                 IMAGE ID            CREATED             SIZE
mcr.microsoft.com/windows/servercore   ltsc2019            715aaeac112d        5 weeks ago         5.06GB

Don’t be alarmed if you don’t see it! You can pull the image yourself. We’ll go over this in a different module

Go ahead and exit the powershell session.

PS C:\Users\Administrator> exit

Also exit from the rsh session.

sh-4.4$ exit
exit
[ec2-user@bastion ~]$