Filed under: Enterprise, Hacks, Open Source, UNIX / BSD, Developer
Roll your own Netboot server on Linux
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).
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Ricky said 2:46PM on 12-09-2006
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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Michael Rose said 3:33PM on 12-09-2006
Argh! I'll fix that in a sec.
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kOoLiNuS said 9:23AM on 12-14-2006
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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Lasaro said 8:53AM on 3-02-2007
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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