I'm making the assumption here that you've deployed a pod to the cluster, and now you're trying to query the node it's running on.

This is actually two distinct problems:

That is, how can a pod identify the concrete Kubernetes node it is running on

There's two ways you can do this, but they both involved the downward API . You can either push the pod name down or push the node name down (or both). You need to do this first to enable the lookups you need. So the pod running the kubernetes python client needs to be deployed like so:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: example-app
spec:
  containers:
    - name: python-kubernetes-client
      image: my-image
      command: [ "start_my_app" ]
        - name: MY_NODE_NAME
          valueFrom:
            fieldRef:
              fieldPath: spec.nodeName
        - name: MY_POD_NAME
          valueFrom:
            fieldRef:
              fieldPath: metadata.name
  restartPolicy: Never
Okay, so now you have the pod information and the node information available to your running pod. 
  
and then query for a full list of pods on this node only
Now that you know the node name the pod is running on, querying for the pods running on it is relatively straightforward using the python API:
#!/usr/bin/env python
from kubernetes import client, config
import os
def main():
    # it works only if this script is run by K8s as a POD
    config.load_incluster_config()
    # use this outside pods
    # config.load_kube_config()
    # grab the node name from the pod environment vars
    node_name = os.environ.get('MY_NODE_NAME', None)
    v1 = client.CoreV1Api()
    print("Listing pods with their IPs on node: ", node_name)
    # field selectors are a string, you need to parse the fields from the pods here
    field_selector = 'spec.nodeName='+node_name
    ret = v1.list_pod_for_all_namespaces(watch=False, field_selector=field_selector)
    for i in ret.items:
        print("%s\t%s\t%s" %
              (i.status.pod_ip, i.metadata.namespace, i.metadata.name))
if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()
                I had hoped that there would be an always existing env var, similar to the remote api server address information. But that clarifies to me that this metadata needs to be explicitly handed down into the Pod ... so I need to see how Rancher v2 allows me to add that spec env references. Thank you very much.
                    – TheDiveO
                Oct 13 '18 at 5:59
                For the field selector: might there be some escaping needed for the nose name,  or does the noise make syntax guarantee that the selector string is syntactically valid for all noise names without any working or escaping?
                    – TheDiveO
                Oct 13 '18 at 6:07
                You’ll have to do the escaping yourself, it’s just a node name, it can’t be syntactically invalid
                    – jaxxstorm
                Oct 13 '18 at 18:21
                The problem I now face on a Minikube/Rancher2 setup is that the Pod doesn't have the required API access rights for listing pods, so I need to set up the RBAC and enable the Pod to those roles/role binding. Unfortunately, I'm left as to how to do: I've found several RBAC posts but I yet lack the understanding how to enable to Pod/PodSpec to use those roles/role bindings?
                    – TheDiveO
                Oct 14 '18 at 15:45
        
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