Guidance in how to build the magic toolchain

[ptorngaard]

wizards of InstaDMG,

before heading out chasing rabbits trails I’d like to get some direction and suggestions as to how to create my system properly.

My setup is as follows:

– units distributed worldwide
– very few servers to run bsdp from (if any …. depend on the willingness of the Network admins)
– primary laptops
– using InstaDMG to make the image used to install the clients
– on top of the image there is a overlay system like Puppet that can complete the setup

What I really need is some guidance in how to setup the tool chain from InstaDMG into Netinstall and all the way to the client. As well as how to best make the clients get the installation as they cannot use the broadcast protocol. Do I send a payload free package to each client that are running the bless command on these to get them booting of the install image.

The location of the Install image will be distributed worldwide but not on OSX servers as we have existing infra for doing that already for other platforms.

Hope that you guys can help with the understanding of how to connect the dots.

Thanks.

[Patrick Fergus]

How big are the pipes between your worldwide locations and your BSDP (NetBoot) capable servers? In theory it would be possible to NetBoot across a WAN link either with an ARD command (“Set Startup Disk”) or NetBoot Across Subnets:

[url]http://www.bombich.com/software/nbas.html[/url]

But in our case, our remote locations can have anything from a 256k DSL line to T1s. Your network admins may have something to say about shoveling that much data across the network.

I’m not sure if NetInstall can handle the images/installations being hosted on another machine–I’ve used NetBoot and NetRestore all of the time. NetRestore shouldn’t care where the images are hosted though, so a combination NetInstall-Restore image may work. I’d be fairly sure someone else on this board would know the specifics about NetInstall.

– Patrick

[dagger2b]

I would just mod an install DVD to boot to NetRestore. If you do it that way you can add the config of whatever file server is available in the area. Depending on the size of the image you might even be able to include the image on a DL disc and do the whole thing from DVD. That is what I do for our imaging center. Basically strip out all the install packages, drop NetRestore in /Application/Utilities, and copy the pre and postWS from your real NetRestore to the etc folder.

[ptorngaard]

[QUOTE][u]Quote by: macshome[/u][p]Remember that on Intel Macs you can netboot across subnets with the bless command.

Other than that all you need to do is forward the BSDP and make sure you route TFTP and NFS or HTTP. If they have setup centralized PXE then it is very similar to that.[/p][/QUOTE]

Do I still have to have forwarding of BSDP even when clients have been blessed with the direct address of the boot server?

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