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After a NetBoot on my macbook, I discovered the keyboard does not work when you’re in the menu. That s #ck $! For now I just put in a workaround. The boot logic in PHP detects the vendor, and boots directly to a specific boot image when booting a Mac. Too bad this isn’t working correctly on a mac. Maybe in the futureI hope. The process of booting a computer system over the network is well understood, and it’s been around for donkey’s ages. Basically, the way it works is that a computer system requests an IP address from a BOOTP/DHCP server, obtains the name of a bootstrap program (e.g. PXELINUX) it should load from.
Posted by5 years ago
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I want to be able to create custom system images to be booted over the network on my physical systems. I've been looking into iPXE (I've gotten it to work via the basic examples) and it gives the exact functionality I'm looking for, the ability to boot via an http server. I've seen other examples that boot memdisk and other tools via iPXE and then an OS on top of that, but I'm pretty lost there.
I'd like to be able to configure a system, let's say CentOS with a webserver and samba preconfigured, and then snapshot that system into an image I can boot with iPXE on any system.
What tools should I be looking at for this functionality?
EDIT: A good analogy for what I'm looking for is a tool that creates something like an AMI on EC2 that can be booted using iPXE
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Active1 year, 7 months ago
I have a network system, where I serve a mini-linux to a connecting client via PXE (pxelinux.0).
I can't get this to work with Mac OS X. Booting from network is there saved for backup operations. I am using PXE v4 (or sometimes 6, if this is better). DHCP serves information like IP, next-server and bootfile.
How could I get this to work on a Mac? Something like gParted? I never tried it.
![Image Image](https://forums.fogproject.org/uploads/files/1468500538375-ipxe_1.jpg)
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user3550252user3550252
2 Answers
![Image for mac and cheese Image for mac and cheese](http://i.minus.com/i7F4kdWdLbYFV.png)
MACs do not use 'exactly' PXE; they use a similar environment called Boot Server Discovery Protocol (BSDP).
The OS X Server includes a system tool called NetBoot. A NetBoot client uses BSDP to dynamically acquire resources that enable it to boot a suitable operating system. BSDP is crafted on top of DHCP using vendor-specific information to provide the additional NetBoot functionality not present in standard DHCP. The protocol is implemented in client firmware. At boot time, the client obtains an IP address via DHCP then discovers boot servers using BSDP. Each BSDP server responds with boot information consisting of:
- A list of bootable operating system images
- The default operating system image
- The client’s currently selected operating system image (if defined)
The client chooses an operating system from the list and sends a message to the server indicating its selection. Air port utility limit for a kindle fire mac address?. The selected boot server responds supplying the boot file and boot image, and any other information needed to download and execute the selected operating system.
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sourcehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preboot_Execution_Environment#Sibling_environments
PatPat
It's possible to PXEboot Intel Macs by first booting a utility like the IPXE replacement PXE firmware:
If your mac has A CD/DVD drive, this isn't too bad, you just burn the IPXE ISO file to a CD and stick it in the CD/DVD drive whenever you want to PXE boot.
If your mac is new enough that it doesn't have CD/DVD drive then I think you can make a bootable USB drive using the EFI version of IPXE. This is, however, much more involved. A Mac doesn't seem to be willing to boot MBR formatted USB sticks, so you can't just get a Live USB image that supports netboot. I've actually been trying to figure out how to do this myself and have not yet quite figured out what's required.
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