ELasticseacrh Cluster won't form bc of no username/pass but setting up user/pass needs a healthy cluster

[Maryam2021]

Hi All,

I am new and probably missing something, stuck in an infinite loop! I am trying to build an ES cluster of 3 nodes. without any xpack it works fine and comes up. now I need to enable the security (btw I am on basic license) so if I try to set "./bin/Elasticsearch-setup-passwords interactive" it says hey u have to enable xpack.security, I go back set that to true (it also asks me to set the transport to true as well which I did) and restarted the Elasticsearch but now the cluster is turning red bc it needs to authenticate!
so username/pass needs the cluster to be healthy and healthy cluster needs user/pass to be set ! this is a broken loop! Am I missing soemthing? please help.

[Yang_Wang]

Cluster forming does not require username/password setup. I suspect the issue you are having is with TLS setup. I suggest you follow the instruction of setup basic security. It would also be helpful if you could share the complete error mesesages from the server log files.