Specifications

1.2 Conﬁguring Netboot Services

To provide NetBoot services to your network, you’ll need a machine running

Mac OS X Server. These instructions assume version 10.4, though they should

work equally well for 10.3. (10.2 is signiﬁcantly diﬀerent, however, so these

instructions will not work for that version.) You should use an unlimited

client license version of OS X, or else you will only be able to boot a limited

number of machines simultaneously.

Please refer to Apple’s documentation regarding the speciﬁcations of the server

hardware itself. Depending on the number of clients, image size, network speed,

and other factors, you may need to scale up your hardware. As our server is

lightly used (fewer than 15 clients booted simultaneously), we get by with a G4

500Mhz machine with mirrored IDE drives for storage and SCSI for client data.

1.2.1 Initial Setup

Begin by installing and conﬁguring a machine running Mac OS X Server. Disable

any services you will not be using. At a minimum, however, you must be running

AFP, DHCP, and NetBoot to run a NetBoot server.

(Note: on Mac OS X Server 10.3, the DHCP service must also be enabled,

even if it serves no actual addresses. This bizzare requirement has been dropped

as of 10.4.)

1.2.2 AFP Settings

Apple automatically conﬁgures a few sharepoints via AFP when you enable

NetBoot. You should not alter or remove these sharepoints at any time.

You do not need to make any special changes to AFP to use NetBoot by itself.

However, if you plan to use NetRestore for system imaging, you will need to

create a sharepoint for the saved disk image ﬁles. Create a folder (or volume) on

the server, and share it via AFP. You may wish to create a new user account that

has access to this share, and disable guests (this prevents people from getting

access to the raw image ﬁles). You can use the Workgroup Manager tool for

these tasks.

1.2.3 NFS Settings

In Server Admin, click on the NFS item. Conﬁrm that the NFS service is

running. If you plan to have a heavily loaded server, you may wish to increase

the number of server daemon processes.