I set up a few Kubernetes clusters preparing for the CKA exam and discovered that upon reboot, my control plane node didn’t work. Running any kubectl command I get:

The connection to the server 192.168.1.57:6443 was refused - did you specify the right host or port?

This is a common error message that can result from numerous issues but I started troubleshooting by seeing if the kubelet process was running with ps aux | grep kube. Nothing…no kubelet service running. Then I looked at /var/log/syslog and I found the problem — swap was back on!

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