I'm installing a cluster of 2 baremetal nodes running RHEL9. I have a Rancher 2.6.9 which already has 2 vm-clusters in it and their working fine. Now when I create this 3rd cluster and register the initial master, it won't become ready. The node stays in state "Waiting for Node Ref" and condition is "Waiting node to become ready and join url to be available". The only warning I see in the logs are in ETCD of "RAFT NO LEADER" and warnings that it cannot connect to some of it's local hosts ports. Any idea what would be my problem here?

The only warning I see in the logs are in ETCD of “RAFT NO LEADER” and warnings that it cannot connect to some of it’s local hosts ports.

Check that the ports are open? I’ve not seen that specific behavior before.

Yea, me neither and it's really weird. The ports are open, I confirmed and firewalld is also disabled. But as for an update, after about 2,5 hours being in that state it suddenly became Ready. Tho I think there is some other problem in the node itself. E.g. after reboot I have to manually restart the rancher-system-agent before it becomes ready. The other node in the cluster got Ready in less than 3 minutes.