# Newbie having issues installing on RHEL

**URL:** <https://discuss.elastic.co/t/newbie-having-issues-installing-on-rhel/366161>\
**Category:** Elastic Search\
**Created:** [September 6, 2024, 2:48pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/newbie-having-issues-installing-on-rhel/366161 "2024-09-06T14:48:27Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![MichaelM88](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/9d8465/32.png) [@MichaelM88](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/MichaelM88)\
**Post date:** [September 6, 2024, 2:48pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/newbie-having-issues-installing-on-rhel/366161/1 "2024-09-06T14:48:27Z")

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Hello,

I recently attempted to install elasticsearch on a RHEL VM. I have been following the tutorial at [Tutorial 1: Installing a self-managed Elastic Stack | Elastic Installation and Upgrade Guide [8.15] | Elastic](https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elastic-stack/current/installing-stack-demo-self.html#install-stack-self-elasticsearch-third).  
When I get up to step 3.2, `sudo curl --cacert /etc/elasticsearch/certs/http_ca.crt -u elastic:$ELASTIC_PASSWORD https://localhost:9200`, I get the error below. If I run `sudo systemctl status elasticsearch`, it does show that elasticsearch is running.  
Does anyone have any idea what is causing the error? I've tried using the ELASTIC\_PASSWORD variable as well as replacing it with the actual password.  
Thank you!

"error":{"root\_cause":[{"type":"status\_exception","reason":"Cluster state has not been recovered yet, cannot write to the [null] index"}],"type":"authentication\_processing\_error","reason":"failed to promote the auto-configured elastic password hash","caused\_by":{"type":"status\_exception","reason":"Cluster state has not been recovered yet, cannot write to the [null] index"}},"status":503}

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**Author:** ![stephenb](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/stephenb/32/40856_2.png) [@stephenb](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/stephenb)\
**Post date:** [September 7, 2024, 12:40am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/newbie-having-issues-installing-on-rhel/366161/2 "2024-09-07T00:40:26Z")

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Hi @MichaelM88 Welcome to the community...

When you installed Elasticsearch and you were [Step 1: Set up the first Elasticsearch node](https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elastic-stack/current/installing-stack-demo-self.html#install-stack-self-elasticsearch-first)

Note

> 1. Copy the terminal output from the install command to a local file. In particular, you’ll need the password for the built-in `elastic` superuser account. The output also contains the commands to enable Elasticsearch to run as a service, which you’ll use in the next step.

That is where the elastic password would be it would look something like this on your output....

```auto

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
✅ Elasticsearch security features have been automatically configured!
✅ Authentication is enabled and cluster connections are encrypted.

ℹ️ Password for the elastic user (reset with `bin/elasticsearch-reset-password -u elastic`):
  sdfgsdfgsdfgsdfgsdfgsdfg. <<<<< THIS IS THE PASSWORD

ℹ️ HTTP CA certificate SHA-256 fingerprint:
  asfdasfdasdfasdf08778ca577502769f8159beecc1a8d5f1edc95422321e528
.......

```

If you did not copy that down... you will need to generate a new password with

> **[elasticsearch-reset-password | Elasticsearch Guide \[8.15\] | Elastic](https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/reset-password.html)**

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![MichaelM88](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/9d8465/32.png) [@MichaelM88](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/MichaelM88)\
**Post date:** [September 9, 2024, 2:17pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/newbie-having-issues-installing-on-rhel/366161/3 "2024-09-09T14:17:46Z")

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Hi Stephen,

Thank you for the reply!  
I did save the password and was entering it. Turned out I needed to change my cluster.initial\_master\_nodes from "localhost" to the name of my first node.

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**Author:** ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/original/3X/1/a/1ac57faf039f6b580b3f104ef42a2a89e41014de.png) [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)\
**Post date:** [October 7, 2024, 2:18pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/newbie-having-issues-installing-on-rhel/366161/4 "2024-10-07T14:18:14Z")

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