HOME env not set in pods for certain deployments (minio/operator deployed through Helm)

[Privatecoder]

Hi @batistein, hi @janiskemper

I have another question regarding a weird issue:

I have three clusters, a K3s- (v1.24.4), a managed K8s- (v1.23.12) and a new CAPH K8s-cluster (v1.24.7).

When deploying the minio/operator Helm-Chart (any version) to all three of them (individually), it does not run on the CAPH K8s-cluster (v1.24.7) because the pods of its deployment are missing the HOME env-var (i.e. echo $HOME returns nothing).

Regular deplyoments and pods are not affected.

I would say this is a minio-issue but the chart does work on the other two clusters (where the HOME env-var is exposed, i.e. echo $HOME returns /root).

ANY ideas?

[Privatecoder]

Any thoughts on this one? @batistein? I create another cluster (HCloud only) with the same result.

[Privatecoder]

wow, that was quick – I'll have a look and report back!

[Privatecoder]

it was closed in 2019 however it's still not fixed in 2021 according to this crun/pull/599, this cilium/issues/14301 and this podman/issues/9378.. and others..

[batistein]

ok you can easily test it out by creating a runtimeClass object pointing to runc. This is also already installed. And then reference it with runtimeClassName in your deployment.

[batistein]

or you can remove crun; or change the default runtime. See: https://github.com/syself/cluster-api-provider-hetzner/blob/main/templates/cluster-templates/bases/kct-md-0-ubuntu.yaml#L39-L50

[Privatecoder]

I will give that a try tomorrow – found the "try runc" tip in a podman issue thread as well. crun seems to be the lightest and quickest solution though and MinIO should ensure a non-empty $HOME var if it requires it.. I opened an issue there as well :)

[Privatecoder]

So I did modify the MinIO Helm chart locally to enable passing runtimeClassName as parameter and deploying it after creating a RuntimeClass-object for runc as suggested.

It did solve the issue; $HOME indeed is present with runc and MinIO does not crash anymore..

[Privatecoder]

@batistein just as a final note here: Maybe using runc would be the better default-choice for the the template as it seems to be less picky in certain scenarios like this one and people who are more familiar with containerd runtime plugins can still easily change it back to crun.

Anyway: Thank you again for your support!