iMac 8,1 Netbooting or lack thereof

[aparsons]

I have been trying to make a netboot set for my macs normal process autodmg of an OS (see below)
autocasperNBI point to casper and host with netsus options enabled reduce image size.

Host on netsus enable sent DHCP option to the ip address of the netsus server for bootserver.

I have tried OS 10.8, 10.9, 10.10, 10.11 for nbi images all of our macs newer than 8,1 will boot to the nbi but the 8,1 macs will not boot what so ever.

I tried making the nbi off from the 8,1 mac, a brand new iMac, a new Macbook Pro and new Mac mini and the second most recent mac mini. I have tried unticking the hosted on netsus and host the nbi on a mac server. I have created in all 30+ combos of options, OS's.

I can see the netboot server in the startup options but booting to it will just result in a bootloop or just skipping to the harddrive.

Im going a little insane trying all the combos of options but any insight on the 8,1's having issues in anyone else's environments? I'm I forgetting something? Please Help! before there is a large fire of apples outside a school.

[Nix4Life]

@aparsons

you didn't give a time line, but have you thought about target disk mode (TDM) just to get going?

[Look]

How many are you talking here?
I just use the USB restorable DMG from AutoCasperNBI for the older iMacs and that seems to work fine (even though the same NBI won't). But we generally have 3 year leased machines so thankfully there are usually only a tiny number of these devices to do every year.

[millersc]

This sounds like a networking problem. Easy test would be put your netboot server and 8,1 client on the same switch (something you know has worked before) and see if netbooting works.

We have lots of 8,1 in our fleet still and have DeployStudio running on our 10.11.x server, with IPHelpers deployed. No issues.

[Look]

AutoCasperNBI uses a full version of macOS to create the Netboot, Deploy Studio has it's own process so they may vary.
We use AutoCasperNBI and regularly find older hardware falls off the list of valid hardware for netboot. But then we want to get rid of that hardware anyway so it's not an issue for us.