Very slow El Capitan netboot

Thanks for your responses bentoms, they are much appreciated.

I've now gotten a response from apple engineers that as of today this is a " known issue" with system image utility and 10.11. I was also told that there is a way to cobble together a 10.11 netrestore image from a 10.10 machine but of course he couldn't comment on how to accomplish that since its outside the realm of what they support. He has recommended that I install all updates as they become available since the fix for this will likely be in an incremental update. He will also be following up with me in 7 days regarding this case and any potential updates by then.

Pretty much the sh*ts since we are just starting reimaging of staff computers in our district and netrestore is the process we use; we're going to deal with a success rate of about 25% with the current netrestore situation.

@spowell01 Likewise, thanks.

Hope we can get back to quicker boot & for you more NetRestores soon.

and i got a call from apple engineering today and i was told, " Yep, its broken!" with reference to 10.11 net restore and net install images created from system image utility. They do not have an eta when it will be fixed but recommend that all users install all new updates as soon as they are available since thats likely how it will be patched. Definitely not the answer i wanted to hear, but quite typical of our experiences with apple over the years.

no updates from my end or apples, we are just moving forward restoring laptops with bootable flash drives. Far from ideal, but its getting the job done just a lot more time consuming. I just find it hard to believe that apple could break such important functionality as net restore....where has quality control gone in their releases?

We have had the same issue up on our campus as well. 10.11.4 Netinstall & Netrestore appear broken. Out of classrooms of ~25 iMacs, we can successfully image about 5-10 at a time. Often having to kill the netrestor boot, and restart it in hopes of it starting successfully.

We have had luck with "pressing keys" during the boot process which seemed to sometimes help. Also, if we allow the computer to go idle for more than 10 / 15 mins (forget what the default screen sleep is) you will not be able to wake the screen back up. So once we finally got them started, we just had to wait and not see any progress.

Also, we had better luck hosting the netrestore images from our 1st gen retina MBP, than our actual mac pro server. Same exact image, will kernel panic if hosted on the mac pro server, despite what it's being deployed to.

Just an update .. I can't get X.10.11.5 to netinstall...so I would expect that the we will see the issues netbooting X.10.11.5...

C

I have confirmed this issue with 10.11.4 and 10.11.5. Does anyone know if the issue is the same using /System/Library/CoreServices/Applications/System Image Utility.app/Contents/MacOS/imagetool
??

I use/used System Image Utility.app in production and in testing .... We follow the Apple guidelines : )

C

Still no news? I have the same problem, it's really inconsistent. I used to netrestore 10.9.5 and 10.10.5 from a server running 10.9, but since I couldn't get 10.11 to boot properly I upgraded the server to 10.11. Still no change.

(Note: this is not regarding netsus, of course, but the problem is the same, I guess)

OS X 10.11.6 came out which probably addresses the netbooting.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT206770

Looks like the Netinstall is working a little better... but only 1/2 through 1st test...

C

Install and restore NBI's are working normally for me with the update.

Using our BSDPy server I'm not seeing much of a difference.

10.11.5 time to boot: 2m21s
10.11.6 time to boot: 2m13s

FYI: Images created with AutoCasperNBI.

I'