Comments on: Admin the Mac: Making a NetBoot Server

By: Keith

Keith — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 09:18:54 +0000

Hi I have the netboot service up and running again but still every image I make kernel panic. Any ideas?

By: Keith

Keith — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 20:18:09 +0000

The boot image works (well I’m almost certain it does as it boots a machine fine from an external disk).

I have the added problem now that after I restarted my machine after playing around with things that I can’t now even get the computers to detect the netboot as an option.

I havent disabled it yet and have gone through all the steps I did from the beginning. I have also installed tftpServer to see if that helped me get a handle on things but hasn’t.

I have checked in activity monitor and bootpd is running.

Any ideas on what else I can check.

Thanks for the help.

By: Michael Votaw

Michael Votaw — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 15:57:38 +0000

Are you sure that the netboot image you’re using works under normal conditions (like on 10.5?) If you make a netboot image from a 10.6 machine, it doesn’t include any PPC components, which can be a problem.

You can disable it by running
defaults write /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/bootps Disabled 1

from terminal. You may need to reboot or manually turn bootps off.

By: Keith

Keith — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 14:43:32 +0000

Hi,

Tried this on 10.6 and the clients can see the image but kernal panic when trying to boot from it.

How can I disable this also as I don’t always want it on?

By: Michael Votaw

Michael Votaw — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 17:04:35 +0000

First: Spike you’re right, they are written in binary. That’s very strange that they would bother making something that would otherwise be text-readable not…

Anyway, fixed the issue of bootpd still being disabled in 10.6
(added “defaults /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/bootps write Disabled 0″)
Let me know if it works!

By: Michael Votaw

Michael Votaw — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 16:16:10 +0000

Yikes! Thanks for pointing that out.
I don’t know what’s going on, but I can’t hit my public_html folder anymore -_-

By: Mrityunjoy Chattopadhyay

Mrityunjoy Chattopadhyay — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 16:12:21 +0000

Thanks a ton for the great script. But probably you have put the 10.6 script in your Univ repo and its forbidden to public.

By: Michael Votaw

Michael Votaw — Wed, 26 May 2010 18:07:00 +0000

Spike: plist files are just xml files; they should be readable.

I’m testing this all out right now, and so far, other than not setting Disable to false in bootpd.plist the script seems to work, except…

I get right to here:

tftpd[403]: adding RRQ to cache: 192.168.1.108,/private/tftpboot/NetBoot/NetBootSP0/
NetRestore Test.nbi/i386/booter
tftpd[405]: adding RRQ to cache: 192.168.1.108,/private/tftpboot/NetBoot/NetBootSP0/
NetRestore Test.nbi/i386/booter
tftpd[407]: adding RRQ to cache: 192.168.1.108,/private/tftpboot/NetBoot/NetBootSP0/
NetRestore Test.nbi/i386/mach.macosx
tftpd[409]: adding RRQ to cache: 192.168.1.108,/private/tftpboot/NetBoot/NetBootSP0/
NetRestore Test.nbi/i386/mach.macosx

and then I lose my IP address, and the server self-assigns. Obviously this means that the client machine can’t talk to the server anymore. The only way I can manage to fix this is by restarting the machine.

Any ideas?

By: a3n

a3n — Tue, 25 May 2010 20:27:46 +0000

spike:

how do i modify the tftp.plist to incorporate those lines you mentioned ? could you post an example?

By: spike

spike — Mon, 10 May 2010 19:50:46 +0000

Thanks for your work on this Michael. I had pretty much the same thing on my script, except I ran the changes for tftp.plist through PlistBuddy…

# Fix tftp.plist for Snow Leopard
# Converted the tftp.plist from binary to xml so I could peek at it with PlistEdit Pro
plutil -convert xml1 /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/tftp.plist
#Ensures tfptd is not disabled and sets server to start in insecure mode
/usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c “set :Disabled false” /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/tftp.plist
/usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c “set :ProgramArguments:1 -i” /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/tftp.plist

everything else was the same…
;-)