<p>I had a friend grant me access to his kube cluster (hosted on IBM Cloud).</p>

<p>I can login via the IBM Cloud console </p>

<p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/el4uH.jpg" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/el4uH.jpg" alt="Access to Worker node"></a></p>

<p>However when I try to access them via the kubectl: 
    kubectl get nodes</p>

<p>results in an error message:</p>

<p><em>Error from server (Forbidden): nodes is forbidden: User "<a href="https://iam.ng.bluemix.net/kubernetes#" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://iam.ng.bluemix.net/kubernetes#</a>" cannot list nodes at the cluster scope.</em></p>

<p>Why would the access (RBACs) be different between the console and the CLI?</p>

Manglu
<p>I am the dev lead for the IBM Kubernetes Service.  You need to generate the RBAC on the cluster first.  You can do this 2 ways.</p>

<ol>
<li>Goto the access tab in the UI and click download cluster config.</li>
<li>Or use the cli and run <code>ibmcloud ks cluster-config xxxx</code> where xxxx is the id of the cluster.</li>
</ol>
