<p>I have minikube running on AWS EC2 instance, installed linkerd and meshed with the application. And installed linkerd viz, when i try to view the dashboard using the command <strong>linkerd viz dashboard &amp;</strong> gets the following error. it says socat not found, what excatly it was?</p>
<blockquote>
<p><em>Waiting for linkerd-viz extension to become available
E0705 08:55:19.417583   12977 portforward.go:400] an error occurred forwarding 38591 -&gt; 8085: error forwarding port 8085 to pod 85909524c53355dd249637263867025b33bc1bad4e330df7ff15f3398f0e5d3d, uid : unable to do port forwarding: socat not found</em></p>
</blockquote>

Kesavan Ramalingam
<p><code>linkerd viz</code> uses <code>kubectl port-forward</code> under the hood, which itself relies on the <code>socat</code> binary to be installed in the kubernetes host. It appears Minikube doesn't provide <code>socat</code>, at least in older versions. You can try a newer Minikube version, or I'd recommend instead switching to <code>kind</code> or <code>k3d</code> which is what the linkerd project uses for testing.</p>
