NetBoot/Restore Across Subnets using Windows DHCP Scope

[dom9inic]

Hi All,

I’m working with the Win Admins to get NetBooting/restoring across subnets going using the DHCP scope options of the Windows DHCP server. This is unchartered territory for us here and we are having little success. Before we give in and stick the Xserve on the subnet of the majority of our Macs and just image on that subnet, is there anyone who knows if using the Windows DHCP scope to set the NetBoot Server and NetBoot File Name will work for the Macs, as it does not for us.

10.6.4 Server.

Cheers,

Dom

[mhoback]

No it won’t work. NetBoot doesn’t use DHCP to find its server, it uses BSDP. What you need to do is add the ip address of your NetBoot server as an ip-helper-address to the router serving the subnet with the Macs on it. That way the router will pass on the BSDP request packets to your server. Alternatively, if you don’t have a router that supports helper-address commands, you can use the bless command to tell the Mac directly which server to boot from. The syntax is “sudo bless -netboot -server bsdp://your.server.here”.

[dom9inic]

Thanks for the concise response. I did know about putting the netboot server in the IP Helper Table, but our net admins don’t do that so don’t want to. They use the DHCP scope for the windows clients, so just wanted to check whether or not the Macs could follow that, and now I have my answer. Thank you.

I’ll have to convince them that this is the only option.

Dom

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