Netboot bloat

[bruce_gannett]

Hello all,

I just made a netboot image from a new 'slim' iMac. The resulting .nbi folder is 19 GB.

Needless to say, booting to this image is best described as 'glacial'.

Anyone have any ideas to make this thing a bit slimmer?

Thanks in advance,
Bruce

Bruce Kincheloe
Gannett GIADC
Indianapolis, Indiana

[damienbarrett]

Well, sure....you can do what we've been doing for ages to trim down Netboot images.

- Delete all unnecessary apps form /Applications and /Applications/Utilities
- delete all the voices in /System/Library/Speech/Voices
- delete all the built-in Desktop Pictures

What you can do it compare your new 10.8 image to a 10.6 one you may have made with the old NetBoot Image Maker tool from JAMF (that not longer works with 10.8) and use it as a guide for what can be deleted. There are lists out there that others have made also. I remember seeing a long thread on MacEnterprise or AFP548 about how to create the smallest Netboot image possible.

This is all assuming that you're creating a Netboot image for imaging purposes. If you're actually going to be Netbooting your machines so the user needs a full OS environment, then none of this advice is relevant.

[franton]

Try monolingual to strip out the extra languages and files that you don't need. There are other posts on slimming things down. Try this one:

https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/discussion.html?id=4751

[bbass]

A little bit of a tangent here but is it possible to incorporate DeployStudio into your imaging workflow? DeployStudio does a much better job with nbi size. Ours are consistently under 3GB.

That might not be helpful (apologies if not) but there are alternatives. We start with DeployStudio before finishing with Casper Imaging.

[alexjdale]

I tried pretty hard to get a DeployStudio image to work, but ultimately couldn't.

In the end, I manually built an image on a disk partition and used Carbon Copy Cloner to capture it as a DMG. That worked best since it provides a list of checkboxes for the directory structure to include/exclude files and directories, so it's easy to use trial and error to build DMGs without certain paths and see if they boot or not.

I tweaked my DMG down to 2.7GB compressed, and like 3.4GB restored. It wasn't all that difficult, but it's not something I want to go through again, it did take me a few hours.

[noahblair]

you can also delete the contents of /private/var/vm/

those contain the swap files OSX uses for virtual memory and sleep memory. the OS will recreate them the next time you boot the OS, even if then next time you boot is via a netboot image.

[tkimpton]

https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/discussion.html?id=4751