Stuck setting up a multi node K8s cluster. Any advice would be great

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Cluster information: Will be a 3 node VM cluster

Kubernetes version: v1.29.2

Cloud being used: bare-metal
Installation method:CLI
Host OS: Ubuntu 22.04.4.
CNI and version:
CRI and version:

So I am setting up 3 VMs running Ubuntu 22.04.4. This is just a home lab I am doing to get experience with kubeadm. So on the master node currently, and will probably face the same issue on the other nodes, I am getting this error. Possibly it is related to containerd, but I cant seem to find the exact issue if it’s something else. I have snapshots of the VM to roll back if needed, as maybe I made an error somewhere. Been looking and many threads but still stuck. Thanks in advance for any help!

Below is the error I am facing currently:

master@master-virtual-machine:/home$ sudo kubectl get nodes
E0311 21:07:23.255149 8510 memcache.go:265] couldn’t get current server API group list: Get “http://localhost:8080/api?timeout=32s”: dial tcp 127.0.0.1:8080: connect: connection refused
E0311 21:07:23.255787 8510 memcache.go:265] couldn’t get current server API group list: Get “http://localhost:8080/api?timeout=32s”: dial tcp 127.0.0.1:8080: connect: connection refused
E0311 21:07:23.257098 8510 memcache.go:265] couldn’t get current server API group list: Get “http://localhost:8080/api?timeout=32s”: dial tcp 127.0.0.1:8080: connect: connection refused
E0311 21:07:23.257358 8510 memcache.go:265] couldn’t get current server API group list: Get “http://localhost:8080/api?timeout=32s”: dial tcp 127.0.0.1:8080: connect: connection refused
E0311 21:07:23.259269 8510 memcache.go:265] couldn’t get current server API group list: Get “http://localhost:8080/api?timeout=32s”: dial tcp 127.0.0.1:8080: connect: connection refused
The connection to the server localhost:8080 was refused - did you specify the right host or port?
master@master-virtual-machine:/home$ sudo kubeadm init
[init] Using Kubernetes version: v1.29.2
[preflight] Running pre-flight checks
error execution phase preflight: [preflight] Some fatal errors occurred:
[ERROR CRI]: container runtime is not running: output: time=“2024-03-11T21:07:27-04:00” level=fatal msg=“validate service connection: validate CRI v1 runtime API for endpoint "unix:///var/run/containerd/containerd.sock": rpc error: code = Unimplemented desc = unknown service runtime.v1.RuntimeService”
, error: exit status 1
[preflight] If you know what you are doing, you can make a check non-fatal with --ignore-preflight-errors=...
To see the stack trace of this error execute with --v=5 or higher
master@master-virtual-machine:/home$

Did you try to (re)start containerd?
sudo systemctl start containerd