A week or 2 ago I added a 10.8 Netboot to our imaging options. Today, I realized one of our servers was out of space. Looks like the shadow files created from the 10.8 Netboot set are huge - over 1.5 gigs each. With our 10.7x Netboots, shadow files were under 200MB.
Any suggestions?
I used the following 2 articles to set up 10.8.2 Netboot. Otherwise, imaging is working as expected
Creating NetBoot Images for Use with the Casper Suite https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/article.html?id=307
NetBoot Error: Startup Disk is Almost Full https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/article.html?id=198 (I did 15 gig)
When you do netboot a system, open a Finder window, then Get Info on the netboot disk. How much available space is shown? Also, have you noticed if the more RAM installed in a system the larger the shadow file?
I am trying to learn more about the behavior of OS version, RAM amount, and proper amount to expand the netboot images too.
/private/var/vm is blank. I think that's something Composer 8.62 clears now when building OS image.
netboot.nbi is 16 gigs, but that's after I did the expand on it. Previously it was under 5 gigs. This is my 2nd attempt at a 10.8 Netboot, the first one was slow for techs and that's why I did the expand to 15 gigs.
found a macbook pro with 4 gigs of RAM. Watched the shadow file on the server, it was ~150MB until right at the end and then as machine rebooted the shadow file jumped to 1.68gig.
Nope. We have one other volume that stores our packages/compiled images, but time of year when I'm testing packages for next year I need that space available.
We have thousands of Macs across 4 netboot servers. Having shadow files for each one 1-2 gigs isn't liveable unless someone is babysitting those servers.
I assume this isn't normal behaviour, the swap file being 100-200MB and then when machine reboots it jumps to 1-2GB?
It is hard to say what is normal. These shadow files are used so the netbooted client can write specific data to them and retrieve it after imaging time. Are you erasing the volume when you image and laying down a compiled image for block copy, at least that is what it sounds like?
How many things are configured in your imaging work flow, that could possibly need to write to a shadow file?
Yes we erase a volume and put down a compiled or not compiled image (we have dozens of configs).
We're not doing anything differently than what we did with our 10.7 netboot set. So the shadow files should be similar size then I'd assume? They are 10x as big for 10.8 netboots (no large file increase on reboot on the 10.7 netboot).
I just realized I had a typo in the edits on the netboot.rc file. First test seems to have worked, will continue to test and report back. Thanks again for posting this site, I had seen it before but hadn't needed it with 10.7 so forgot about it.
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