<p>We have a rancher cluster composed by 8 machines : </p>

<ul>
<li>1 rancher server</li>
<li>2 controlplanes</li>
<li>3 etcd</li>
<li>2 workers</li>
</ul>

<p>Recently, we lost our rancher server. In the <code>.kube/config</code> generated by rancher, the server referenced is the rancher server :</p>

<pre><code>apiVersion: v1
clusters:
- cluster:
    certificate-authority-data: XXX
    server: https://1.2.3.4/k8s/clusters/c-qz7pq
  name: k8s
</code></pre>

<p>However, even without the rancher server up, the kubernetes cluster is still up and running but it's not possible to connect to it with kubectl command line because the rancher server referenced in the <code>.kube/config</code> is down. I tried to add the control plane ip in place of rancher server ip in the <code>.kube/config</code> but it doesn't work.</p>

<p>Is there a way to adress directly the kubernetes API working with rancher ?</p>

<p>Rancher version : 2.1.3</p>

<p>Kubernetes version : 1.11.5</p>

<p>There currently is not a way to do this, but we are working on it and you can track its progress here:
<a href="https://github.com/rancher/rancher/issues/13698" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://github.com/rancher/rancher/issues/13698</a></p>

<p>If the cluster is provided by GKE, AKS, or EKS, you have the direct access provided by the cloud providers. Meaning, you can log into their UIs and basically obtain a super admin level kubeconfig</p>

<p>For RKE based clusters, a direct-to-k8s, super-admin kubeconfig is not easily exposed, but this would be addressed by the above feature I mentioned</p>
