kubernetes: Authentication to ui with default config file fails - kubernetes

Question

I have successfully set up a kubernetes cluster on AWS using kops and the following commands:
$ kops create cluster --name=<my_cluster_name> --state=s3://<my-state-bucket> --zones=eu-west-1a --node-count=2 --node-size=t2.micro --master-size=t2.small --dns-zone=<my-cluster-dns>
$ kops update cluster <my-cluster-name> --yes
When accessing the dashboard, I am prompted to either enter a token or
Please select the kubeconfig file that you have created to configure access to the cluster.
When creating the cluster, ~/.kube/config was created that has the following form:
apiVersion: v1
clusters:
- cluster:
certificate-authority-data:
<some_key_or_token_here>
server: https://api.<my_cluster_url>
name: <my_cluster_name>
contexts:
- context:
cluster: <my_cluster_name>
user: <my_cluster_name>
name: <my_cluster_name>
current-context: <my_cluster_name>
kind: Config
preferences: {}
users:
- name: <my_cluster_name>
user:
as-user-extra: {}
client-certificate-data:
<some_key_or_certificate>
client-key-data:
<some_key_or_certificate>
password: <password>
username: admin
- name:<my-cluster-url>-basic-auth
user:
as-user-extra: {}
password: <password>
username: admin
Why when pointing the kubernetes ui to the above file, I get
Authentication failed. Please try again.

Answer 1

I tried the same and had the same problem. It turns out that kops creates a certificate based authentication. Certificate based authentication can't be used on the web UI interface. Instead, I tried using the token based authentication. Next question, where do you find the token?
kubectl describe secret
This will show you the default token for the cluster. I assume this is very bad security practice but if you're using the UI to improve your learning and understanding then it will get you moving in the right direction.
This Dashboard wiki page is about authentication. That's where I discovered how to do it.

Answer 2

In order to enable basic auth in Dashboard --authentication-mode=basic flag has to be provided. By default it is set to --authentication-mode=token
To get the token or understand more about access control please refer here