A Handy Way to Deploy OSX Netboot and NetInstall Images of Multiple OSX Versions
Making a Netboot or NetInstall Image of a Different version of OSX
As of OSX 10.5, making a Netboot image with System Image Utility requires you to use the same OS version as the host on which you are making the image. That means that you can't make a 10.4, or 10.6 image on 10.5. What I discovered, quite by accident, is that with OS 10.4.9 (standard), after installing Network Admin Tools, I was able to create a Panther Netboot image with no complaints whatsoever, allowing me to deploy multiple versions of OSX from one Netbook Imaging host, without needing to reboot, change OS versions, or do any fancy tap-dancing.
I don't believe that anyone has documented this elsewhere in the past, as any and all Netboot literature that I have read states that 'it is impossible to make a Netboot image of a different OS version than the one that you are running at present'. I'm telling you that is a lie.
That's correct: I made an image of a 10.3.5 low-resource CD image--a 650MB boot to the Finder CD that I made years ago, that was still floating in my repository--in 10.4.9 (standard, not server), and it merely performed the task flawlessly. I had not intended to do this, but as I already had the image handy (and mounted), I decided to try using Imager to make a Netboot of it, completely expecting Imager to refuse; yet it didn't even wince.
That leads me to wonder why 10.5.x Server won't permit me to make a 10.4 image. From what I remember, OSX Imager reads the Mach kernel from the disk that you image, not the running OS, so I'm thinking it is a form of forced upgrading. Let the UFO, conspiracy theory, end of the world paranoia begin!
Practicality
I have found a way to make a rather universal Netboot image of OSX. GOing through my collection of MacOS Install discs--a black binder full of Mac OS stuff, all the way back to Mac OS v1 Beta, that I have leftover from a Mac devkit, circa 1984; and OSXL for good measure--I made images of every version of OSX from 10.0 ('Cheetah'), through 10.6 ('Snow Leopard'). I doubt there is a version of MacOS that I haven't owned or used through 10.6, but that was the end of the line for me, as I disliked what I saw in 10.7 with tremendous vigour, and have no need for anything later in any event. To my surprise and delight, as well as bewilderment, the Tiger Imager successfully made NetInstall images of each of these. I am guessing however, that 10.4 can image anything through 10.6, and probably later versions as well, although I'm not holding my breath on 10.9, and I do not have 10.7 through 10.9 discs to use in testing this theory.
Thus far, I have NetInstall Images for 10.0 ('Cheetah'), 10.1 ('Puma'), 10.2 ('Jaguar'), 10.3 ('Panther'), 10.4 ('Tiger'), 10.5 ('Leopard'), and 10.6 ('Snow Leopard'); plus diskless boot images of Panther, and Tiger, as well as 9.2.2 ('LU1'), for good measure. Combined with some sparse images on my network, I have used these to create usable, lab systems, that have no internal hard drives, and use the sparse images for swap space, with the Netboot images as their startup volumes.
I believe that Tiger's Imager is an invaluable tool for multi-version Netboot creation, as it is a huge, frustrating, hair-pulling, pain on the bum to install and load a specific OSX version, merely to make a Netboot or NetInstall image, that differs from what you run on a regular basis; and I think we could all breathe easier knowing there is be a more universal, albeit bizarre, method to avoid that predicament.
It certainly did same me a heap of time, making these images at an amazing pace. On that point, Imager v10.4.7 seems much faster than later versions, quite possibly because it doesn't need to add users, propagate permissions, and do all other sorts of processes, or any other fancy tasks: It just clones an image into an nbi, and then runs it as-is, 'no questions asked'. You can still set a default user, and do other housekeeping tasks with Imager 10.4.7, but not as many as later versions.
Imager Differences
Therefore, the downside is that, unlike 10.5 Netboot, on 10.5 Server, I can't add multiple, specific accounts or add functions to the Netboot images that I make on 10.4, as the output is just a raw boot of whatever the image already has on the source volume, plus one default user, if desired.
The (other) user accounts, applications and so forth, as well as preference settings on the image are fixed, and can't be changed in the process of creating the Netboot image; however, in the case of making images for general deployment, this may make sense, particularly if you have a master install that you want to mirror on multiple systems, as NetInstall, or Netboot (including as a diskless Netboot deployment).
You can make a small imprint system image, with a root user, an Administrator user, and a Public user, plus the needed applications, tweaks and so forth, then turn that into a .dmg file, and use 10.4.7 Imager to convert that into a Netboot (or NetInstall) package, finally placing it on your Netboot server for deployment, in a remarkably small space of time.
The catch is that you have to manually add the required accounts to the image beforehand, and if you need to add any later, than you will have to either modify the image, or set it up initially to use LDAP/OpenDirectory. You can, of course, add manual NFS mountpoints, and symlinks, then share any applications over a central server, using only the required system frameworks on the image, reducing the image size, thus saving space, but you need to do all of that on the system from which you are going to derive a master image for deployment to a series of other systems (again), in advance.
If you need additional mountpoints with specific names, on a regular basis, you may also want to consider a shell script to take care of them, in a virtual manner.
Versions Amok
Knowing now that that old 10.3 Emergency Boot CD that I made back in 2003 was a legitimate target for Imager on 10.4, I wanted to explore the capabilities of this Imager version to the fullest extent at my disposal. What next, i asked myself? Why not try to make a 10.3 NetInstall?
This task is a bit of a tricky one, as Apple originally shipped 10.3 (Panther) on a trio of CDs, mostly due to the fact that a DVD drive in a Mac was a super-fancy add-on (i.e. the Superdrive) at that time. Thus, I first created a custom 10.3 DVD, by combining the 10.3 CD images: This process is a fairly simple, and you can find literature on how to do it quite readily, should you find the need, but for a Netboot image, you must make a single DVD-sized master image file from which you can make a Netboot image.
After I completed the task, I ran Imager 10.4.7 again with this new Frankendisc, and again, it cheerfully generated the nbi for me, and not long after, I had a fully-functional 10.3 NetInstall alongside my Bizarro-10.3 Netboot image on my network. I fully validated and confirmed that I can use the 10.4 Imager to make a 10.3 NetInstall!
In further testing its flexibility in this task, and verifying that 10.4 could make a 10.3 NetInstall image, I was able to conclude that the ability of Imager 10.4.7 to make a 10.3 NetBoot image was not due anything on my custom, Emergency Boot Panther CD.
Next discovering that I could make 10.3 images, I again ran the 10.4 System Image Utility, using a disc image of 10.5 Server Install as a source. It smiled and winked at me, and completed the image in record time, after which I copied it to my Netboot server, from which it runs flawlessly. That's right: You can make 10.3, 10.4, and 10.5 Netboot images on Tiger!
The fact is that, unlike other versions of Imager, v10.4.7 is essentially, version Agnostic. It could also possibly create other OS builds, including custom Darwin builds, and not break a sweat. In theory, you could also modify the kernel to do some other task, and build a very lightweight OS that works under Netboot conditions, however I cannot say with any degree of certainity if this version will work with 10.7 ('Lion'), or later versions of OSX, of their corresponding kernels. I suspect that it would, but I need a valid 10.7 (or later) install disc, to check versions later than 10.6, as I don't run anything newer for a variety of reasons beyond the scope of this column.
Imager Version -and- Running on 10.5
The specific version of 10.4 System Image Utility that I am using to do this is 10.4.7 (build 263.8). I did try to copy that version onto OSX Server 10,5, and it seems to hang at 'Getting Sources', so if you want a more universal Netboot and Netinstall maker, you will need to run 10.4 on something, but it works from the standard version of Tiger, which makes it easy to deploy a Netboot/Netinstall imaging station on a very inexpensive system, from which you can make PPC, Intel or Hybrid images.
I expect you could also run the Intel version of Tiger on a virtual machine upon whatever OSX version you use in normal operations. I don't recall any VM software to run PPC OSX 10.4, either on PPC systems or on Intel system due to the endian problems; and I think Mac-on-Mac could only run through OSX 10.3 for whatever reason, so if you want to avoid running PowerPC hardware, a simple VM with a basic installation of Tiger (Intel) and the 10.4.7 Server Admin Tools should do the trick for you.
I am still hazy about why later versions of Imager can't do this, and also on why the 10.4.7 version of Imager, which should be a Universal Binary, chokes and splutters at me when I try to run it on 10.5. Clearly something changed in how System Image Utility works between 10.4 and 10.5, as the 10.4 version doesn't have Workflows or any of the more robust features, and any fancy bells and whistles, but for what I needed to do, it was fantastic. I now have a platform that can seemingly make a NetInstall or NetBoot image of any OSX version.
I have yet to try it with YDL or Ubuntu; but who knows? I may be able to shove those down its throat as well, and deploy Linux live CDs from 10.4 on a standard Apple Netboot server, to boot Linux on Mac hardware (as non-Mac systems use PXE, which is a different protocol that OSX Netboot does not use), and that would really the cherry on top.
-XS (14th February, 2014)
Link to 10.4.7 Server Tools (from Apple): http://support.apple.com/downloads/Server_Admin_Tools_10_4_7
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v1.3, Updated on 1st March 2014
Making a Netboot or NetInstall Image of a Different version of OSX
As of OSX 10.5, making a Netboot image with System Image Utility requires you to use the same OS version as the host on which you are making the image. That means that you can't make a 10.4, or 10.6 image on 10.5. What I discovered, quite by accident, is that with OS 10.4.9 (standard), after installing Network Admin Tools, I was able to create a Panther Netboot image with no complaints whatsoever, allowing me to deploy multiple versions of OSX from one Netbook Imaging host, without needing to reboot, change OS versions, or do any fancy tap-dancing.
I don't believe that anyone has documented this elsewhere in the past, as any and all Netboot literature that I have read states that 'it is impossible to make a Netboot image of a different OS version than the one that you are running at present'. I'm telling you that is a lie.
That's correct: I made an image of a 10.3.5 low-resource CD image--a 650MB boot to the Finder CD that I made years ago, that was still floating in my repository--in 10.4.9 (standard, not server), and it merely performed the task flawlessly. I had not intended to do this, but as I already had the image handy (and mounted), I decided to try using Imager to make a Netboot of it, completely expecting Imager to refuse; yet it didn't even wince.
That leads me to wonder why 10.5.x Server won't permit me to make a 10.4 image. From what I remember, OSX Imager reads the Mach kernel from the disk that you image, not the running OS, so I'm thinking it is a form of forced upgrading. Let the UFO, conspiracy theory, end of the world paranoia begin!
Practicality
I have found a way to make a rather universal Netboot image of OSX. GOing through my collection of MacOS Install discs--a black binder full of Mac OS stuff, all the way back to Mac OS v1 Beta, that I have leftover from a Mac devkit, circa 1984; and OSXL for good measure--I made images of every version of OSX from 10.0 ('Cheetah'), through 10.6 ('Snow Leopard'). I doubt there is a version of MacOS that I haven't owned or used through 10.6, but that was the end of the line for me, as I disliked what I saw in 10.7 with tremendous vigour, and have no need for anything later in any event. To my surprise and delight, as well as bewilderment, the Tiger Imager successfully made NetInstall images of each of these. I am guessing however, that 10.4 can image anything through 10.6, and probably later versions as well, although I'm not holding my breath on 10.9, and I do not have 10.7 through 10.9 discs to use in testing this theory.
Thus far, I have NetInstall Images for 10.0 ('Cheetah'), 10.1 ('Puma'), 10.2 ('Jaguar'), 10.3 ('Panther'), 10.4 ('Tiger'), 10.5 ('Leopard'), and 10.6 ('Snow Leopard'); plus diskless boot images of Panther, and Tiger, as well as 9.2.2 ('LU1'), for good measure. Combined with some sparse images on my network, I have used these to create usable, lab systems, that have no internal hard drives, and use the sparse images for swap space, with the Netboot images as their startup volumes.
I believe that Tiger's Imager is an invaluable tool for multi-version Netboot creation, as it is a huge, frustrating, hair-pulling, pain on the bum to install and load a specific OSX version, merely to make a Netboot or NetInstall image, that differs from what you run on a regular basis; and I think we could all breathe easier knowing there is be a more universal, albeit bizarre, method to avoid that predicament.
It certainly did same me a heap of time, making these images at an amazing pace. On that point, Imager v10.4.7 seems much faster than later versions, quite possibly because it doesn't need to add users, propagate permissions, and do all other sorts of processes, or any other fancy tasks: It just clones an image into an nbi, and then runs it as-is, 'no questions asked'. You can still set a default user, and do other housekeeping tasks with Imager 10.4.7, but not as many as later versions.
Imager Differences
Therefore, the downside is that, unlike 10.5 Netboot, on 10.5 Server, I can't add multiple, specific accounts or add functions to the Netboot images that I make on 10.4, as the output is just a raw boot of whatever the image already has on the source volume, plus one default user, if desired.
The (other) user accounts, applications and so forth, as well as preference settings on the image are fixed, and can't be changed in the process of creating the Netboot image; however, in the case of making images for general deployment, this may make sense, particularly if you have a master install that you want to mirror on multiple systems, as NetInstall, or Netboot (including as a diskless Netboot deployment).
You can make a small imprint system image, with a root user, an Administrator user, and a Public user, plus the needed applications, tweaks and so forth, then turn that into a .dmg file, and use 10.4.7 Imager to convert that into a Netboot (or NetInstall) package, finally placing it on your Netboot server for deployment, in a remarkably small space of time.
The catch is that you have to manually add the required accounts to the image beforehand, and if you need to add any later, than you will have to either modify the image, or set it up initially to use LDAP/OpenDirectory. You can, of course, add manual NFS mountpoints, and symlinks, then share any applications over a central server, using only the required system frameworks on the image, reducing the image size, thus saving space, but you need to do all of that on the system from which you are going to derive a master image for deployment to a series of other systems (again), in advance.
If you need additional mountpoints with specific names, on a regular basis, you may also want to consider a shell script to take care of them, in a virtual manner.
Versions Amok
Knowing now that that old 10.3 Emergency Boot CD that I made back in 2003 was a legitimate target for Imager on 10.4, I wanted to explore the capabilities of this Imager version to the fullest extent at my disposal. What next, i asked myself? Why not try to make a 10.3 NetInstall?
This task is a bit of a tricky one, as Apple originally shipped 10.3 (Panther) on a trio of CDs, mostly due to the fact that a DVD drive in a Mac was a super-fancy add-on (i.e. the Superdrive) at that time. Thus, I first created a custom 10.3 DVD, by combining the 10.3 CD images: This process is a fairly simple, and you can find literature on how to do it quite readily, should you find the need, but for a Netboot image, you must make a single DVD-sized master image file from which you can make a Netboot image.
After I completed the task, I ran Imager 10.4.7 again with this new Frankendisc, and again, it cheerfully generated the nbi for me, and not long after, I had a fully-functional 10.3 NetInstall alongside my Bizarro-10.3 Netboot image on my network. I fully validated and confirmed that I can use the 10.4 Imager to make a 10.3 NetInstall!
In further testing its flexibility in this task, and verifying that 10.4 could make a 10.3 NetInstall image, I was able to conclude that the ability of Imager 10.4.7 to make a 10.3 NetBoot image was not due anything on my custom, Emergency Boot Panther CD.
Next discovering that I could make 10.3 images, I again ran the 10.4 System Image Utility, using a disc image of 10.5 Server Install as a source. It smiled and winked at me, and completed the image in record time, after which I copied it to my Netboot server, from which it runs flawlessly. That's right: You can make 10.3, 10.4, and 10.5 Netboot images on Tiger!
The fact is that, unlike other versions of Imager, v10.4.7 is essentially, version Agnostic. It could also possibly create other OS builds, including custom Darwin builds, and not break a sweat. In theory, you could also modify the kernel to do some other task, and build a very lightweight OS that works under Netboot conditions, however I cannot say with any degree of certainity if this version will work with 10.7 ('Lion'), or later versions of OSX, of their corresponding kernels. I suspect that it would, but I need a valid 10.7 (or later) install disc, to check versions later than 10.6, as I don't run anything newer for a variety of reasons beyond the scope of this column.
Imager Version -and- Running on 10.5
The specific version of 10.4 System Image Utility that I am using to do this is 10.4.7 (build 263.8). I did try to copy that version onto OSX Server 10,5, and it seems to hang at 'Getting Sources', so if you want a more universal Netboot and Netinstall maker, you will need to run 10.4 on something, but it works from the standard version of Tiger, which makes it easy to deploy a Netboot/Netinstall imaging station on a very inexpensive system, from which you can make PPC, Intel or Hybrid images.
I expect you could also run the Intel version of Tiger on a virtual machine upon whatever OSX version you use in normal operations. I don't recall any VM software to run PPC OSX 10.4, either on PPC systems or on Intel system due to the endian problems; and I think Mac-on-Mac could only run through OSX 10.3 for whatever reason, so if you want to avoid running PowerPC hardware, a simple VM with a basic installation of Tiger (Intel) and the 10.4.7 Server Admin Tools should do the trick for you.
I am still hazy about why later versions of Imager can't do this, and also on why the 10.4.7 version of Imager, which should be a Universal Binary, chokes and splutters at me when I try to run it on 10.5. Clearly something changed in how System Image Utility works between 10.4 and 10.5, as the 10.4 version doesn't have Workflows or any of the more robust features, and any fancy bells and whistles, but for what I needed to do, it was fantastic. I now have a platform that can seemingly make a NetInstall or NetBoot image of any OSX version.
I have yet to try it with YDL or Ubuntu; but who knows? I may be able to shove those down its throat as well, and deploy Linux live CDs from 10.4 on a standard Apple Netboot server, to boot Linux on Mac hardware (as non-Mac systems use PXE, which is a different protocol that OSX Netboot does not use), and that would really the cherry on top.
-XS (14th February, 2014)
Link to 10.4.7 Server Tools (from Apple): http://support.apple.com/downloads/Server_Admin_Tools_10_4_7
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v1.3, Updated on 1st March 2014
Last edited:
