Mac Lab New Image Creation

How to create a new Intel image

NetRestore has reached EOL from creator Mike Bombich, information on this page should be considered outdated and kept only for referencing purposes. To image a mac, please see MacImaging and DeployStudio.

Alert Make sure that the master machine and the lab machine have exactly the same Mac OS before creating a boot image. The reason is that the (nbi) netboot image uses files from the master OS to create the image and incompatabilities between OS's will cause problems.

-- DevonMerner - 2013-07-12

Note: The basic process here is that a client boots from a disk image maintained on the server. When the client boots, the only application that launches is NetRestore and it either start restoring the master image to the local hard drive immediately or it gives you the option to choose a configuration, target and options prior to imaging.

Set up the master machine as desired and use NetRestore Helper to create a master disk image. Save the disk image to a Mac OS X server (hosted via AFP, NFS, HTTP, or multicast ASR)

Use NetRestore Helper to create a NetBoot image set that boots to NetRestore. Set up a configuration that indicates where your master disk image is located (usually under /Library/NetBoot/.sharepoint).

Launch and configure NetRestore. When finished, quit NetRestore. Launch NetRestore Helper. You may run NRH from the latest and greatest model of client computer that you plan on NetBooting, or you may run it from the NetBoot server.

Click on the "Create NetInstall Set" tab. Follow the instructions by providing a name for the image set (for example, "NetInstall-Restore") and a unique image ID. The image ID should not be the same as the image ID of other images on your NetBoot server.

Choose a protocol that you prefer to use for hosting this particular NetBoot image set. If you don't know which to choose, choose NFS. HTTP requires additional server configuration, is marginally slower, has a 2GB file size limit, but may allow you to perform NetBoots in environments that have firewall restrictions in place preventing the use of NFS.

Explore the advanced options.

Authenticate by clicking on the padlock button.

Click on the "Save NetInstall-Restore set" button. If you're running NRH from the NetBoot server, save the image set to /Library/NetBoot/NetBootSP0 (or the equivalent directory on another volume). The process will take about 5 minutes.

When the process completes, you will be prompted to configure NetRestore's default settings. You may skip this step if you configured NetRestore prior to launching NetRestore Helper.

If you ran NRH from the client, you will have to copy the [name].nbi directory on the client machine to the /Library/NetBoot/NetBootSP0 directory on the NetBoot server.

-- Main.echrzano - 16 May 2006