Upgrade SAY Sí’s server to X.2 and set up OS X.2 Netboot clients

For the last 2.5 years I've had the SAY Sí network happily running Mac OS X Server v1.2. With this setup we've been able to Netboot OS 9 clients in our Media Arts Studio.

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The SAY Sí Media Arts Studio

Over the last few weeks I've been working on upgrading so that we can Netboot OS X.2 clients and upgrade to newest versions of our applications.

I began the process by upgrading an existing B&W G3 tower. It had 448MB of RAM, a 300MHz G3 processor, and a 40GB hard drive. I purchased and installed a 450MHz G4 ZIF processer upgrade and a 120GB 7200 RPM hard drive. Then I patitioned the hard drive into 5 drives in preparation for the way I've configured our network storage. Then I installed Server X.2. All of this went smoothly.

For the last 6 weeks I've been working on the Netboot setup. This has been really frustrating - mainly because the documentation for this is not all in one place. It's mostly spread out over a 600 page admin guide. That's most of it but not all. I learned a lot from the postings on Apple's discussion pages. I've finally got a workable NetBoot image that my students can use. I've still got a few things to iron out before it's done but most of the work is now complete.

(3.14.03 - Update)
Yesterday I worked out the last major issues that were outstanding. Here are two important things that I learned.

1. if you need a Netboot Hard Drive that is larger than 2GB, the easiest way to accomplish this is to update to server 10.2.4. This version adds support for Netboot Hard Drives up to 10GB.
2. If you would like to use traditional Mac-like file permissions instead of UNIX-like file permissions, make sure both your server and netboot are running 10.2.3 or later. This was something that gave me a lot of trouble. By default when your users create a new folder or file, only they have read and write prividleges. Everyone else has read only. This is no good if your users are going to collaborate on anything. If one makes a folder and puts a document in it, no one else can modify that document or put anything else in the folder. If you run 10.2.3 or higher on both server and client there is the option of setting the default permissions of a share point to "inherit permissions from parent". This means if a user creates a folder and changes the permissions to read and write for the group, for example, then everyone in that group can modify and create documents in that folder. That's because everything in that folder inherits the permissions of the parent folder.

Why go through all of that trouble you might ask? NetBoot is amazing technology. Once it's set up I'll do little more in the way of network admin than add new users and make backups. It is one of the things that makes a program like mine possible. Without it, managing our network would not be something I could do and still have time to teach or write grants.

I put together a document with what I've learned about setting up an OS X NetBoot lab. I did it mainly for my own benefit but I put out there because It certianly would have saved me many hours if I had this information 6 weeks ago. If you are interested in doing something like this, feel free to contact me. I don't mind having another to work through the challenges of setting a lab like this up.

Resouces:
How To Create and Setup a Custom NetBoot Disk Image by Michael Verdi (updated 3.14.03)
Server Admin Guide
Apple Message Boards