My Problem

I was attempting to downgrade my minikube kubernetes version to match an EKS cluster I had running in AWS.

This should have been fairly simple:

sudo minikube delete
minikube start --vm-driver=none --kubernetes-version 1.14.9

Unfortunately, it failed! Minikube would pause on staring kubernetes for about 4 minutes, and then fail. The kubelet was not coming up for some reason.  The output was huge, but this caught my eye:

Streaming server stopped unexpectedly: listen tcp … bind: cannot assign requested address

I spent about 2 hours going back and forth and even tried rebooting my laptop and starting a current/new version cluster again (which was already working), all to no avail.

The Solution

Eventually, I saw a post which suggested I had networking problems, and from that point I worked out that my /etc/hosts file was messed up.  This line was commented out from when I was toying around with some DNS name faking on another project:

#127.0.0.1 localhost

So, localhost wasn’t defined and weird things were happening (obviously). Un-commenting this and starting minikube worked after that.

I’m sure this error can manifest from other networking issues as well; hopefully this saves you some time or points you in the right direction at least.