[Casper] Netboot newbie

[James Partridge]

On 3 Nov 2008, at 01:14, Jim Oring, Jr. wrote:

> I'm in the process of experimemting with netbooting and am very
> interested in what others are doing to make this a seemless process.

One important thing to keep in mind is the steps you need to take if  
you are going to be NetBooting across subnets. Mike Bombich (as usual)  
has written the definitive descriptions of the whole NetBoot process,  
and things to watch out for):

Troubleshooting the NetBoot process: <http://www.bombich.com/mactips/netboot.html 
 >
NetBooting across subnets: <http://www.bombich.com/mactips/nbas.html>

The key step is for whoever administers your network hardware to make  
sure that routers on any subnets that will have machines NetBooting  
can pass BSDP traffic. If this works then everything else follows  
pretty easily.

I'd also recommend looking into a good administrative method for  
managing which machines are allowed to NetBoot and which aren't.  
Apple's MAC address filtering is the right thing to do (imo) but the  
interface for managing MAC addresses in Server Admin is, well, a bit  
rubbish really. If you have a large number or a high turnover of  
machines allowed to NetBoot then it's really easy to lose control of  
the MAC address filter.

In general, though, I'd say read those two articles by Mike Bombich.  
I've never seen anything better for understanding the NetBoot process.  
If you are NetBooting both PPC and Intel machines then pay close  
attention to the sections about NetBooting multiple architectures.

Cheers

James


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
James Partridge
Systems Development & Support (Apple)
NSMS
Oxford University Computing Service
13 Banbury Road
Oxford OX2 6NN

Tel.: (01865) 273207
iChat: james.partridge at mac.com







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