How does Lens (Kubernetes IDE) get direct shell access to Kubernetes nodes without ssh keys?

Question

I couldn't find an equivalent k8s cli command to do something like this, nor any ssh keys stored as k8s secrets. It also appears to do this in a cloud-agnostic fashion.

Is it just using a k8s pod with special privileges or something?

Edit: oops, it's open-source. I'll investigate and update this question accordingly

Answer 1

Posting this community wiki answer to give more visibility on the comment that was made at a github issue that addressed this question:

Lens will create nsenter pod to the selected node

protected async createNodeShellPod(podId: string, nodeName: string) { 
  const kc = this.getKubeConfig(); 
  const k8sApi = kc.makeApiClient(k8s.CoreV1Api); 
  const pod = { 
    metadata: { 
      name: podId, 
      namespace: "kube-system" 
    }, 
    spec: { 
      restartPolicy: "Never", 
      terminationGracePeriodSeconds: 0, 
      hostPID: true, 
      hostIPC: true, 
      hostNetwork: true, 
      tolerations: [{ 
        operator: "Exists" 
      }], 
      containers: [{ 
        name: "shell", 
        image: "docker.io/alpine:3.9", 
        securityContext: { 
          privileged: true, 
        }, 
        command: ["nsenter"], 
        args: ["-t", "1", "-m", "-u", "-i", "-n", "sleep", "14000"] 
      }], 
      nodeSelector: { 
        "kubernetes.io/hostname": nodeName 
      } 
    } 
  } as k8s.V1Pod; 

and exec into that container in lens terminal.

-- Github.com: Lensapp: Issues: How Lens accessing nodes in AKS/EKS without user and SSH key under ROOT?

---

I've checked this and as it can be seen below the Pod with nsenter is created in the kube-system (checked on GKE):

• $ kubectl get pods -n kube-system (output redacted)

kube-system   node-shell-09f6baaf-dc4a-4faa-969e-8016490eb8e0             1/1     Running   0          10m

---

Additional resources:

• Github.com: Lensapp: Lens: Issues: How does lens use terminal/ssh for worker nodes?
• Man7.org: Linux: Man pages: Nsenter