Before you read what I write. Read who I am.

Originally from Alberta and in the last number of years having been living in Vancouver, British Columbia. We are now living in Woolwich, London where we inhabit a wonderful little 2 floor flat in the Royal Arsenal. The family has grown over the years from being just my wife and I to the family of four we are now. My work has brought us to London for the next two years where for the first time in ages we will live in the same house for more than a birthday. The experience is written below from then till now. With a view of the Thames from our windows and boat ride to work the new life begins.

11 Oct 2007

Against All Odds

Man vs Netboot with a capital B.

It may appear the there has been a lot of 'Vs' going on in my life lately but that's only because I have been fighting some epic battles against myself. This one is no exception.

I've been trying to get a similar system to our PXE booting for Windows machines going at work for the Mac's. Netboot is built in to the OS X server and is relatively easy to setup. The issue is that it is offered on local subnets only. Our Network Guru (NG) was working with me to try and get the system to work across subnets with some router adjustments to allow for the BSDP process, I was trying to get the image put together and neither of us was having much luck at first.

NG got the network side running and was forwarding packets to my server but there was still no dice in the boot process. He captured some data of the boot process and watched traffic going between the two units. Much to my dismay he couldn't see anything wrong with the data going back and forth other than the fact that it simply stopped after a short time.

Well, I then worked on my end. I created new images from different machines and made sure that I had a solid creation process going on. No Hiccups there. I also tried removing my local switch from my test server, putting the server and client together on a switch within the network and putting them on a Dlink router completely isolated from the network. When this last environment did not produce a boot I came to the conclusion that it was not a network problem. I thought long and hard about what the issue could possibly be...

I checked the whole system over and over... I made a new image (again), I redid the configuration of the Netboot server (again) I also made sure that there were Netinstall and Netboot packages and that if I OPTION booted my Mac I could see an image available. Everything was pointing to A-Ok but still... I could not boot the image. It would see the server, start loading the image and then Kernel Panic. Everytime.

I worked on this late in to last night with no luck and again this morning. I finally decided to start at the most basic level. Making sure that I had not screwed this up in any way. That's when I saw it... In order to load the images, you need a specific set of folders setup in the /Library level.

/Library/NetBoot/NetBootSP0

My problem, and the only problem in getting those dang images to load... a Capital B.

I had written it out /Library/Netboot/NetBootSP0

I changed the B and tried again... Instant success. I'm glad I figured it out but I'm so annoyed that I was temporarily beaten by a lowercase letter.

Anyways, the final issue of booting this image across the 5 subnets I have and then to a whole other studio was still present. Bombich provided an answer to that in a simple little application. Now both studios can boot various install and NetBoot images from my server with ease. I am so Happy.

Now, after the baby comes ( 6 Days ) I can go back to work and see if I can get a dual boot system working on this.

I'll make sure to get a fresh bottle of Advil.
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