Bragging rights, Netboot image size

[charliwest]

So how small have you managed to get your netboot.dmg? (and still have it working)

[nessts]

why is a small NBI so important? I like to embed a 50GB file in my NBI so i can make room to test install things like adobe creative suite

[franton]

My record is 2.8 - 3 Gb.

I'm not sure why the heck you'd want a 50Gb file in your NBI however. I have rsync the net boot nbi around several servers and that would just chew our LAN.

[c0n0r]

I think it all comes down to what your organization needs. @nessts needs Adobe Creative Suite, mine needs Office + McAfee + a dozen other apps. Such configs are never going to be tiny, no matter the skills of the engineer building the image.

[mojo21221]

Got mine down to 2.65 GB. The main use is solely Casper Imaging and Disk Utility...

[charles_hitch]

Ok I am curious for those that have got the NBI under 5GB what OS X version you are using. My usage, like @mojo21221 is Casper Imaging and Disk Utility. I am struggling getting Mavericks below 7.3GB.

[charliwest]

My most recent was a 10.8.5 and is 3.44GB, all I use is Casper Imaging and Disk Utility, although since then have found a few other things I can get rid of I think to shrink it down further (My mavericks one should be smaller but keep getting an error 2 with System Imagine Utility which I can't figure out) what @mojo21221 showed here https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/discussion.html?id=8832 is really great I think

[nigelg]

Currently got a 4.78GB compressed Mavericks image. The actual size is 15GB (mostly free space). Trying to get rid of the "run out of space" error i was experiencing.

Used the script from https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/discussion.html?id=4751

and resized the netboot.dmg with hdiutil resize -size 15g /path/to/dmg before compressing it again in Disk Utility.

[bentoms]

Hi All,

Have you seen a real-world difference when shrinking a NetBoot?

FWIW, I believe the NetBoot process only loads those parts of the image that are needed..

[franton]

@bentoms Nope. But I don't shrink them for that reason. I have a single image that's synced out to eight different servers so speeding up network sync speeds was my priority.

And you're right about it only loading what it needs btw.

[bentoms]

@franton, thanks. I have that requirement too.

[charles_hitch]

@bentoms, the only reason we shrink the netboot image is to get it to fit on an 8GB USB drive and be able to boot off that. We have a significant number of locations to support across the US and just can't support a NetBoot server per. So we just take the NetBoot.dmg that is created in the nbi, tweak it a little, and restore to USB. Voila bootable USB that is the exact same as our NetBoot environment. Works great for us.

[bentoms]

@charles.hitch thanks for the reply.

I added the option to create a read only dmg for restoring to a USB drive in AutoCasperNBI. (That app was what sparked me asking here).

Anyways, please try it if you get the time.

https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/discussion.html?id=11356