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If that's a viable and advisable path, then I think I need to compose a bootable ISO with the CLI. It's not yet clear whether I need to operate a separate Elemental control plane or it's part of Rancher or Harvester.

It's part of Rancher, not Harvester directly

I found a working configuration with the LEAP cloud image. Now I think Elemental is more about the toolkit for customizing an image than it is about an alternative, curated installation media. I'll keep an eye out for more information about Elemental, but it is not the prerequisite that I believed it might be for using the harvester node driver. I would love to know how the capabilities compare with Packer, or if that's not an apples to apples comparison, to have my view corrected.

Elemental https://elemental.docs.rancher.com/ is a few things 🙂 it relies on the toolkit https://rancher.github.io/elemental-toolkit/docs/ which is used to craft the images indeed, I would not compare it apples to apples to Packer (more opiniated and specific) There is an Operator & UI Extension for Rancher also and the full story is to organize the deployment and management of clusters without any interaction on the target systems (in a secure way) Elemental nodes are prepared to boot and reach out to a Rancher instance and the 'plan' is applied to the nodes

A noble goal: non-interactive node mgmt. Presently, I can't think of any immediate need to log in to my LEAP-based nodes, but they're young, yet. I admit there's probably a more K8sish way to go about things like packet sniffing and open files inspecting and the like, but I haven't found those tools yet. If complete life cycle management is an aim of Elemental, then I will expect good things! Appreciate the insights.