As per the “Nutanix Kubernetes Platform Administration (NKPA)” documentation, during the preparation of the environment for an air-gapped deployment, the first task involves installing critical software packages on the bastion host. The bastion host acts as a jump host in a secure network and requires tools such as yum-utils, bzip2, and wget to facilitate the retrieval and processing of required images and configuration files.

Specifically, in the NKPA 6.10 course under "Preparing the Air-gapped Environment", the documentation clearly states:

"The initial step for configuring the bastion host includes installing required pre-requisites like yum-utils, bzip2, and wget. This ensures that the host has the basic tools to download and manage required container images and other dependencies."

This step is explicitly called out as the first actionable item before proceeding to more advanced tasks like configuring public IP access or creating a bootstrap cluster. The need for these pre-requisite packages is foundational, as they are required to handle image downloading and manipulation in the subsequent steps of the air-gapped installation process.