High Sierra NetRestore Failing

[upworkadmin]

Hi folks:

In a nutshell:
I am running into an issue where I am unable to netrestore a High Sierra image.

The image fails at the screen where you select your hd/disk utility.
It will say prepare to netrestore then after a few mins, it fails and says something like netrestore cannot be completed, blah blah etc.

Any ideas?

The longer version:

I initially was trying to build a high sierra image. I tried to save it on a mac mini (sierra) but got an error 2. I initially thought the issue as to why I couldn't save the image because the two os are different from each other. After upgrade to high sierra, i still couldn't save the image. After doing some researching, i learned/realized that you can only save the image to a machine as long as they're the same os.

The initial problem was not being able to save the image. The new problem is that the image fails.

I thought initially because the mac mini was built on a sierra image, maybe that's why the image is failing. So I created a new mac server with a cleanly installed high sierra os to test and see if the image can be pulled. Unfortunately, that did not work so I'm stuck.

I absolutely have no idea what to do.

Things that I've read online that may or may not be related:
- High Sierra pulls firmware updates off the internet
- APFS is junk
- Imaging is dead?
- The mac OS server creates the saved image as hfs+ rather than apfs?
- The version of High Sierra that I'm trying to save is 10.13.4 and there's some chat going around saying deploying 10.13.4 will not work but 10.13.0 - 10.13.3 should work

[dan-snelson]

@ladiesman1150 On your fresh 10.13.4 machine, are you able to create a 10.13.4 NetInstall Image and see if it works as expected?

[upworkadmin]

@dan.snelson i have not tried a net install yet. I have no problem trying that but can you explain why I should try netinstall?

Thanks.

[dan-snelson]

@ladiesman1150 More of a sanity check than anything else …

… just to make sure SIU and "Install macOS High Sierra.app" are working.

[upworkadmin]

It looks like netrestore wont work with High Sierra 10.13.4. Supposedly, 10.13.0 - 10.13.3 can work.
I confirmed that 10.13.3 works however, it selectively works. I was able to image a 13" non touch bar (current generation) and a 15" touchbar but the image failed w/ the airs, mbp 15" (previous generation) and 13" touchbar.

Anyone else run into this issue or something similar?

[nkuhl30]

No issues with 10.13.4 NetRestore images here. However, our employees are still using 2012 MacBook Pros, non-retina, with the optical drives. We bought a bunch when Apple stopped selling them last year.

[upworkadmin]

@nkuhl30 if you don't mind sharing, can you tell me how your environment is set up? How do you save it, etc. I would like to see what I am doing differently.