I beg you Kubernetes gods for a hand
General Box Info
SteamCloud is a box where Kubernetes is mostly at play through the manipulation of kubeletctl, kubectl, and a little curl.
The general goal is to gain a foothold into the more “admin-like” commands that are unaccessible by sheer kubeletctl command execs and curl. The bigger picture here is that of other similar boxes where mounting a directory is needed in order to read the contents of a container and execute its contents freely, instead of running commands on containers through a long and painful string of flags after kubeletctl or curl.
PROBLEM
My problem is being able to authenticate through kubectl - I keep getting asked for a Username (WHY?). Despite a large number of attempts at inputting the correct certificate authority and token (both found within the same directory by running kubeletctl <IP> exec "token/cert location" -p pod name -c container name - I’m keeping it vague to avoid spoilers). I made sure to save the token as an environment variable and have the certificate as a file all within the same directory for order.
Having achieved the boiling point, I decided to see the official walkthrough and copy-paste the same command it was issuing. But nada, nothing! I kept being asked for a Username. At this point, I resorted to querying you almighty kubernetes masters.
This is the command I used to try and check the pods through the token and certificate:
kubectl --server=https://10.10.11.133:8443 --token=$<token_name> --certificate-authority=<cert_name> get pods
Please enter Username: I love kubernetes 
Any help will be appreciated!
UPDATE
Instead of putting the token into an environment table I saved it as a file and ran the same command as a bove but now I get an error saying:
error: You must be logged in to the server (Unauthorized)
So weird!