Posts made by Quantum

@Uncle-Frank I’ve been playing around with a NetSUS VM a bit in the last couple days and soft of figured some stuff out. In a “normal” OS X NetBoot environment, the initial “booter” file is loaded over TFTP, and then that loads the DMG image over HTTP (or optionally NFS on OS X Server). The booted DMG then mounts a temporary home folder for the client on the netboot server using AFP (netatalk).

Since FOG uses an ipxe.efi at the TFTP stage, the rest become irrelevant because iPXE is going to do it’s own thing. So I actually think you’ve got this pretty much ready to go.

Also, I haven’t tested this extensively yet, but it appears that if the main DHCP server does NOT have the options set for PXE booting, and a second DHCP server (ISC-DHCP in this case) with the PXE options set globally with a simple

subnet 172.20.1.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
	allow unknown-clients;
}

to allow subnets - both servers added to ip helper-address list, the PXE client will pull the proper boot information. Got the idea from looking at the NetSUS’s DHCP config file and a number of references on Microsoft centered forums for using SCCM over VLANs - ip helpers is the only officially supported method. DHCP options work, but are not supported by Microsoft.

I’m not as familiar with dnsmasq and ipxe, but I have been successful using isc-dhcp and syslinux.efi for a while in another pxe environment. It was successfully loading memtestx86+ and gparted live in EFI mode. Again, I don’t know about ipxe, but Syslinux is now packing all their libraries (c32’s) in architecture specific subdirectories. I should also note that - in my experience - once the efi version is loaded, it can’t load a BIOS loader: eg. cant load pxelinux.0 from syslinux.efi. Likewise, I wasn’t able to load any kernels that didn’t have EFI boot stubs.This weekend I’ll try setting up a copy of the above environment at home and see if I can switch it to iPXE. Can’t make a promise that it will happen this weekend though because it’s my daughters birthday.

option architecture-type code 93 = unsigned integer 16;
#64 bit syslinux.efi renamed to bootx64.efi
#32 bit syslinux.efi no name change
#changed from pxelinux.0 to new lpxelinux.0
if option architecture-type = 00:09 {
filename "bootx64.efi"
} elsif option architecture-type = 00:07 {
  filename "bootx64.efi"
} elsif option arch = 00:06 {
 filename "syslinux.efi"
} else {
 filename "lpxelinux.0"
}

@Uncle-Frank Your correct, and I believe you are close if not entirely there. I just looked over the “fancy” DHCP config snippet you have posted on the the wiki link you posted and compared it to JAMF’s (https://github.com/jamf/NetSUS/blob/master/NetBoot/var/appliance/conf/dhcpd.conf) and there are some small differences, mostly in the lower half. I don’t know how significant they are.

Is this included in Fog’s default config, or is it something that admins have to add themselves later? Somehow the NetSUS worked with that DHCP config (modified slightly through the web gui - IP address and .nbi path). All we needed to do was add it to the ip-helpers in our switches and it would hand out the NetBoot info, but not address. They did use a patched dhcpd though, so that could be part of it?? Also, does this show up in OS X’s System Preferences -> Startup Disk? I thought that needed a properly formed .nbi folder, but that may just be on OS X Server?

@Wayne-Workman Not a problem. I can see since I mentioned registration in my post that it could be a little confusing. To clarify for anyone else that might look at this, I’m talking about being able to NetBoot a brand new, fresh out of the box, never been booted before Mac directly to Fog.

@Jbob I don’t think it will be terribly difficult to get working on the distros Fog supports. JAMF updated the NetSUS since the last time I looked at it to also support RetHat / CentOS, so the relevant packages should be there. I just hope that the build_ipxe_nbi script I included isn’t so old that it needs to be completely re-written.

And thank you @Developers !

Hello everyone! I just found out through a colleague this project was active again! Anyway, I’m aware that in the projects GitHub page there is a mac-boot repository, which will be great for devices already in Fog. My feature request is to also include Mac’s native netboot capability so new devices can immediately be added to Fog. JAMF Software has a free NetBoot appliance based on Ubuntu using netatalk, samba, tftp-hpa, and apache - GitHub project here if anyone would like to reference the configs: https://github.com/jamf/NetSUS

The same colleague mentioned above also (long ago) made an iPXE netboot image using the old script attached below. build_ipxe_nbi.txt