It can't be denied; NetBoot is cool. Even though Apple's network startup technology is mostly aimed at big educational and corporate deployments, it can be helpful in a small gaggle of Macs as a tool for diagnostic boot or machine imaging. There's a price to be paid, though: by default, you need Mac OS X Server (starting at $499 retail for a 10-client license) to provide the various bits of plumbing needed for a successful NetBoot deployment.Enter Jeff McCune of Ohio State, with help from Christopher Suleski at Rutgers. Sensing the inherent injustice in this situation, Jeff has written up a thorough guide to getting NetBoot working with a Linux server, using the CentOS distribution and a slew of open source tools. While previous guides have tackled NetBooting OS 9 clients from a Linux server, this is the first I've seen that addresses OS X for both PPC and Intel machines. Grab an old PC with two Ethernet cards and you're on your way to NetBoot nirvana.
Keep in mind that this is not a project for the faint of heart or wary of the CLI. As McCune indicates on his wiki, even experienced UNIX admins would probably spend a few hours getting everything just right. Compare your time cost vs. the old G4 tower you could probably draft into service and the price of a 10.4 Server 10-user license... you do the math.
[via Macenterprise.org mailing list]
Update 3:30 pm Sat: "Read" link corrected below via tinyurl (it's HTTPS, so it has to be redirected).
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
12-09-2006 @ 2:46PM
Ricky said...
The "read" link is bad. The correct link is https://www.math.ohio-state.edu/wiki/administration/macosx/netboot/bsdp_with_isc_dhcp
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12-09-2006 @ 3:33PM
Michael Rose said...
Argh! I'll fix that in a sec.
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12-14-2006 @ 9:23AM
kOoLiNuS said...
the hard works pays itself just in any case where you have >2 places to do that kind of work and >10 machines on a single location.
that was easy :-)
tnx for the news !
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3-02-2007 @ 8:53AM
Lasaro said...
Hi. Nice blog.
I've been googling around but can't find the answer to my problem. Maybe you know it or can point me the right direction.
We are getting a bunch of the new Intel XServe to be used by various applications that may require different OSs, on different points in time. So, my question is, do you know if I can netboot these servers on different OSs? Can the different partitioning requirements be changed at boot time, or am I dreaming?
Thanks a lot.
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