Waiting for linkerd-viz extension to become available

Question

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 linkerd viz dashboard & gets the following error. it says socat not found, what excatly it was?

Waiting for linkerd-viz extension to become available E0705 08:55:19.417583 12977 portforward.go:400] an error occurred forwarding 38591 -> 8085: error forwarding port 8085 to pod 85909524c53355dd249637263867025b33bc1bad4e330df7ff15f3398f0e5d3d, uid : unable to do port forwarding: socat not found

Answer 1

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