I'm just getting started with the labs and I've hit a bit of trouble right off the bat, I'm not sure which direction to explore for possible solution.

I'm installing k8s using kubeadm, my infra is AWS based, I have my own VPC (might be something with the network setup), inside the VPC which is accessible from the internet of course I have 2 ubuntu ec2 instances, a master and a worker.
The security group for each instance has the inbound rules as described here:
https://kubernetes.io/docs/setup/independent/install-kubeadm/

I was able to complete lab 3.1 almost to the letter, the only issue I saw was with the commands :
sudo cp -i /etc/kubernetes/admin.conf $HOME/.kube/config
sudo chown $(id -u):$(id -g) $HOME/.kube/config

I kept getting an error saying sudo: unable to resolve host ip-10-0-..

by this point the master is in ready state and all pods (including calico) are running so I pushed forward
at lab 3.2 I was able to bootstrap the worker, but when that joined the master I have one calico pod in error mode, everything else was according to the lab description so I pushed forward again
I stopped at 3.3 as the nginx pod is stuck in containerCreation, the description of the pod gives back this:

Events:
Type Reason Age From Message
---- ------ ---- ---- -------
Normal Scheduled 1m default-scheduler Successfully assigned default/nginx-64f497f8fd-d9pth to ip-10-0-1-111
Warning FailedCreatePodSandBox 10s kubelet, ip-10-0-1-111 Failed create pod sandbox: rpc error: code = Unknown desc = [failed to set up sandbox container "8196208e2cf244509e49b6fedc7952042a79197763a1dc751b96a8ce17e4a313" network for pod "nginx-64f497f8fd-d9pth": NetworkPlugin cni failed to set up pod "nginx-64f497f8fd-d9pth_default" network: Unable to retreive ReadyFlag from Backend: client: etcd cluster is unavailable or misconfigured; error #0: client: endpoint http://10.96.232.136:6666 exceeded header timeout
, failed to clean up sandbox container "8196208e2cf244509e49b6fedc7952042a79197763a1dc751b96a8ce17e4a313" network for pod "nginx-64f497f8fd-d9pth": NetworkPlugin cni failed to teardown pod "nginx-64f497f8fd-d9pth_default" network: Unable to retreive ReadyFlag from Backend: client: etcd cluster is unavailable or misconfigured; error #0: client: endpoint http://10.96.232.136:6666 exceeded header timeout
]
Normal SandboxChanged 9s kubelet, ip-10-0-1-111 Pod sandbox changed, it will be killed and re-created.

The problem seems obvious? I get something similar from the calico pod that's failing as in it's unhappy cuz of etcd, but installing etcd and/or configuring it was not in the labs as far as I can tell, what am I missing?

Please advise.

Regards,
Naim