Netbooting B/W G3’s and Tray-Load iMacs

[spectre_240sx]

I’ve been all over the web looking for information on the netboot process for these older machines. I’ve learned a few things, mostly being that they’re a bit more picky than the later models, but as far as I know, they should still be able to do what I want them to do: re-image them with netrestore. I’ve figured everything out pretty well so far, and I’ve got a newer slot-load iMac working with it, but I haven’t been able to get the older machines to boot. They definately think about it, as they stay at the grey screen (no apple) for about 30 seconds or so, but then they continue to boot OS X from the internal drive.

Our current setup has a fairly robust router which serves dhcp and acts as a caching proxy server as well. This is running on Suse Linux. Our X-Serve sits behind this with an internal IP only. I’ve read in the past that DHCP needs to be running in order to get some of these older machines to netboot, but I was unclear as to whether the X-Serve needs to be running DHCP or whether it can be another box on the network. I didn’t see any netboot specific items in the DHCP configuration (nor did I expect to) so I personally can’t see a problem with having another machine serving DHCP as long as the clients are able to get an address.

At any rate, if there’s anyone out there who could point me to some information on netbooting these older boxes (information on the entire netboot process, i.e. from dhcp through server discovery, etc. would be excellent).

Thanks,
-Brian

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