As many of your out there have come across the same problem, this series of web pages is being provided to help offer some direction in understanding the present process of net booting some of the new macintosh machines. (Any G3 (blue/white series or later) and iMac (any color series available as of this writing.))

As a side effect of this research, I found it was possible to net boot the entire OS for a newer G3 (or better) or iMac from a Linux Box running DHCP Server, TFTP Server, and the Asun Netatalk. (Information on how this was done is included on this site too.)

This setup is not for the faint of heart, nor is it packaged in a nice RPM (here, but Rob Lineweaver has ported these ISC DHCP v2 patches to ISC's DHCP v3 servers and rolled a binary RPM package for some common linux distros (See the how-to and patches section for where to download patchs and the choices you have in patches.) Note: this does not include the MacOS system, or the other "standard" support packages needed and you will still need to do some work), or DEB format for easy installation. If you want to do this, will need to patch a source tree (DHCP), compile code (like DHCP and others if you need them and cannot find a package for them.) I will try to document the procedure in a step by step format for those that may need it. Did I miss a step? Let me know and I will try to add it to the procedure.

The focus of this web site is to describe what has been possible, explain some of the problems with how Apple chose to implement it for large organizations to use, and describe the products of reverse engineering their netbooting system.

• A Brief review for setting up the Mac OS X Net-Booting Server may be of some assistance to those that need to re-familiarize them-self with the setup again.(Incomplete as of 10-11-99. If anyone would like to add more, please submit a text file with the changes, or put up a web page, and let me know the link! (thanks))
• The problem with Mac OS X Net-Booting server on large campuses is discussed in limited detail with some possible solutions. Some costly with hours of administration, other costly with devices, and others costly with both devices and hours of administration.
• DHCP-Response Analysis: Understanding what was going on at the network and transport and application levels became the next step. After a complete review, the only non-standard part of DHCP/BootP, TFTP, and AFP/FS/IP was the DHCP/BootP server response, so this difference is discussed here in more detail.
• Duplicating the Mac OS X Server BootP/DHCP Response: Creating an entry in my *NIX box /etc/dhcpd.conf (in this case it was a Linux Laptop) to offer the netbooting Macintosh the information it needs to continue its booting process from an arbitrary tftp, and AFP/FS/IP server for each of the needed shares was the next step in this process. On the page, to which this link takes you, are links to a CGI that can take your text based information and make an entry for dhcpd.conf that may work on your network.
• Patches (and information on how-to) were required to DHCP's source code to allow the DHCP server to package all of the vendor specific options into the return response without exceeding the standard's 64 byte maximum unless the client offers a Maximum Message Size that is larger. These patches patch DHCP in different ways so as to allow for the above link's Form to CGI output to work properly.
• Security issues in making this choice are something you *really* should examine before making your decision. If you have more to offer than what I have posted, let me know and I can add your statements here too.

People to thank:

• Andru Luvisi: This is my work associate and friend. A very intelligent, good man, and a great friend. He helped me with some functions like the one for dealing with string to hexadecimal conversion so that I could create a CGI to take form data from a user on their networked mac and how its should be booted, and created a sample dhcpd.conf entry for that host.
• William P McGonigle is a member of the netatalk mailing list that had seen one too many questions like, "Has anyone been able to get a mac to NetBoot from an Asun+Netatalk system" and put up one of the "http://artoo.hitchcock.org/netboot/": first known web pages to address this with useful links related to it. (Their DNS no longer resolves this - bummer) If he has left them, and relocates his pages please let me know so I can link to it again. (Since I wrote the above, I think he can now be found as the maintainer of the Netatalk FAQ-O-Matic and apears to have a new e-mail address of netatalk@zettabyte.net.
• Ted Lemon is a guy that has been working on DHCP for a long while. He offered some directions for making changes to the source code that I could submit to him to have included in the main tree so that diff patches would not be needed. He also pointed me MMS in the dhcp source tree which was exactly where I needed to be to work around the non-standard need included by Apple in their NCs to use a larger than 64 byte area for vendor specific options without having the client request an MMS.
• Alistair Riddell has used much of this information and started up a web page specific to making Linux + Netatalk do netbooting without a Mac OS X Server, or anything proprietary except a recent licensed copy of MacOS (non server version) and a piece of Apple Hardware capable of netbooting. You may wish to see Alistair's Web page on this as he is spending more time developing a procedure specific to Linux+netatalk and having this work on linux. He also provides a newer dhcpd patch than mine. (Do not apply both patches to DHCPD from ISC! Choose one, and go with it. I would suggest going with his, as he has more time to develop this.) I have heard he is running an operation with around 400 netbooting Macs with OS 9 from a FreeBSD cluster. DANG! Very cool stuff. :-)
• Rob Lineweaver for his work on this in a production environment, the patches for ISC DHCP Server v3 On his page at http://staff.harrisonburg.k12.va.us/~rlineweaver/macnb/ and active support in this area. I hear he has 50 Macs all booting from the same server (while Apple states you should only use 20-30 clients to the same server.) Way to go Rob!
• Dan Baker is presently working on some proof of concept to support 200 Netbooting clients! As he develops this system for use in a production environment, he will try to update people to status and information on the project at http://linux.keystones.com/ . He plans to include discussion of items including: Detailed log of problems and situations, Importance of a solid network - before testing, Detail on hardware, and software used, information on software incompatibilites, Reliability issues, What happens if all the computers turn on at once, Slimming down images for best performance, usability, etc.

  Last I heard he had 32 machines running off of one server with 5 10/100 NICs, 512MB RAM. Booting all machines took less than 4 minutes. Client and server side performance was not impacted. Server load averaged 5% with a peak of 70%. Soon he will move to 50 Netbooting machines! Go Go Go!

Comments and/or suggestions?: Email me at: dugan@passwall.com(Realize that I am very busy, and may not have time to respond to all E-mail messages. If you include NETBOOT MACNC (all Caps) as beginning it is more likely to get my attention... ;-)

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