Node Not Rejoining After Reboot

A rebooted node failed to rejoin the cluster due to kubelet identity mismatch.

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What Happened

After a kernel upgrade and reboot, a node didn’t appear in kubectl get nodes. The kubelet logs showed registration issues.

Diagnosis Steps

1Checked system logs and kubelet logs.
2Noticed --hostname-override didn't match the node name registered earlier.
3kubectl get nodes -o wide showed old hostname ; new one mismatched due to DHCP/hostname change.

Root Cause

Kubelet registered with a hostname that no longer matched its node identity in the cluster.

Fix/Workaround

• Re-joined the node using correct --hostname-override.
• Cleaned up stale node entry from the cluster.

Lessons Learned

Node identity must remain consistent across reboots.

How to Avoid