This message was deleted.

maybe try #harvester

it was more of a rancher question I think, and I didn't really see a better fitting channel but sure, I can go there

Try to create a user in the cloud-init config and use that to log in. The default login is whatever you set it to be in the image you have. I suspect cloud-init isn't running which rancher needs to bootstrap the nodes.

the issue turned out to be dns resolution of the rancher instance was failing, managed to get in using the ssh key from rancher