Skip to main content

Aside from the issues with the kernelcache in 10.9, has anyone successfully gotten 10.9 set up to use a RAMDisk?
There was an article from the University of Utah on how to do this for 10.6. This worked even through 10.8 but I can not get it to work in 10.9. It just reboots the machine like there is a problem with the rc.netboot file. Seeing as how Apple continually revamps the internals of the OS, I'm wondering if it is still possible to set it to boot to a RAMDisk.



Here is the relevant article: http://www.macos.utah.edu/documentation/administration/setup_netboot_service_on_mac_os_x_10.6.x_client.x_client/setup_netboot_service_on_mac_os_x_10.6.x_client-diskless_netboot.html

I still use this method as of 10.9.2. I have found that backing up the original and copying and pasting the alterations in works best for me.

Thanks, I've tried that and I just can't seem to get it working.
Anyone else?

Worked fine for me on 10.9.1 NetBoot set.
Try this;
https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/discussion.html?id=6443#responseChild33353

@Kumarasinghe
Didn't know about the shadow file hack. Thanks!



@Kumarasinghe @Caitlin_M so far its 2-0 that it still works. So I guess I'm going back to the drawing board and see what I did wrong. Thanks for the input.

FYI, my 10.9.3 NBI has been flaky, i can get through an asr and then sometimes have to reboot to get a package to install. sometimes halfway through installing packages it gets errors, and other times no errors. I grew the RAMDISK variable to 1 million yesterday and I did not see any more problems but did not do as much with netboot yesterday either. Just wondering if anybody else has seen that type of weirdness?

@Kumarasinghe FYI, I tried to make the changes you linked to (change kextutil to kextload) but it seems this is the default as of 10.9.3. I haven't yet checked earlier versions of 10.9.

@nessts taking your advice, I'm upping my new image to 1 million as well. Can't hurt right?
The only issue I see would be very old Macs that maybe don't have that much RAM.

well in my limited thinking, this should be smaller than 1GB, I am going to guess that all computers that will boot 10.9 have at least this much memory.

and since i could not stand my limited thinking i can now safely say its 488MB
(localhost) ~ 4 8:42am% diskutil erasevolume HFS+ 'RAM Disk' `hdiutil attach -nomount ram://1000000`
Started erase on disk3
Unmounting disk
Erasing
Initialized /dev/rdisk3 as a 488 MB case-insensitive HFS Plus volume
Mounting disk
Finished erase on disk3 RAM Disk

@nessts Thanks! Yeah that shouldn't be a problem if we're expecting these machines to run Mavericks. Heck, I may up it to 2 million!

Well, I created a new 10.9.3 Netboot set but I can't tell if it works because I'm running into kernelcache issues again! This time though, the scripts I've used before aren't working. Ugh.

Not sure if this will help you with your kernelcache issues, but this works for me... I saw a post suggesting to copy the kernelcache from a 10.9 netinstall image into your netboot set. Here's the discussion: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/macenterprise/bqZuM5GnMD0/3ayqeNdPwdIJ

Hi all,



If you're still having issues with this, please can you try AutoCasperNBI https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/discussion.html?id=11356



I wrote it to help with issues like this.

Terms & ConditionsCookie settings