I recently hit one of those Kubernetes issues that looks like a networking problem at first, then a CNI problem, then an RKE2 problem, and finally turns out to be something much simpler: the control-plane VM did not have enough resources. It cost me most of an evening, so I'm writing down the trail while it's fresh.

The setup was a fresh RKE2 cluster on a Proxmox VM. After installing RKE2, I checked the node status:

kubectl get nodes

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