NetBoot Issues / RAMDisk with 10.9

[jrippy]

Aside from the issues with the kernelcache in 10.9, has anyone successfully gotten 10.9 set up to use a RAMDisk?
There was an article from the University of Utah on how to do this for 10.6. This worked even through 10.8 but I can not get it to work in 10.9. It just reboots the machine like there is a problem with the rc.netboot file. Seeing as how Apple continually revamps the internals of the OS, I'm wondering if it is still possible to set it to boot to a RAMDisk.

Here is the relevant article: http://www.macos.utah.edu/documentation/administration/setup_netboot_service_on_mac_os_x_10.6.x_client.x_client/setup_netboot_service_on_mac_os_x_10.6.x_client-diskless_netboot.html

[Caitlin_H · Accepted solution]

I still use this method as of 10.9.2. I have found that backing up the original and copying and pasting the alterations in works best for me.

[Caitlin_H · Accepted solution]

I still use this method as of 10.9.2. I have found that backing up the original and copying and pasting the alterations in works best for me.

[jrippy]

Thanks, I've tried that and I just can't seem to get it working.
Anyone else?

[Kumarasinghe · Accepted solution]

Worked fine for me on 10.9.1 NetBoot set.
Try this;
https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/discussion.html?id=6443#responseChild33353

[jrippy]

@Kumarasinghe
Didn't know about the shadow file hack. Thanks!

@Kumarasinghe @Caitlin_M so far its 2-0 that it still works. So I guess I'm going back to the drawing board and see what I did wrong. Thanks for the input.

[nessts]

FYI, my 10.9.3 NBI has been flaky, i can get through an asr and then sometimes have to reboot to get a package to install. sometimes halfway through installing packages it gets errors, and other times no errors. I grew the RAMDISK variable to 1 million yesterday and I did not see any more problems but did not do as much with netboot yesterday either. Just wondering if anybody else has seen that type of weirdness?

[jrippy]

@Kumarasinghe FYI, I tried to make the changes you linked to (change kextutil to kextload) but it seems this is the default as of 10.9.3. I haven't yet checked earlier versions of 10.9.

[jrippy]

@nessts taking your advice, I'm upping my new image to 1 million as well. Can't hurt right?
The only issue I see would be very old Macs that maybe don't have that much RAM.

[nessts]

well in my limited thinking, this should be smaller than 1GB, I am going to guess that all computers that will boot 10.9 have at least this much memory.

[nessts]

and since i could not stand my limited thinking i can now safely say its 488MB
(localhost) ~ 4 8:42am% diskutil erasevolume HFS+ 'RAM Disk' `hdiutil attach -nomount ram://1000000`
Started erase on disk3
Unmounting disk
Erasing
Initialized /dev/rdisk3 as a 488 MB case-insensitive HFS Plus volume
Mounting disk
Finished erase on disk3 RAM Disk

[jrippy]

@nessts Thanks! Yeah that shouldn't be a problem if we're expecting these machines to run Mavericks. Heck, I may up it to 2 million!

[jrippy]

Well, I created a new 10.9.3 Netboot set but I can't tell if it works because I'm running into kernelcache issues again! This time though, the scripts I've used before aren't working. Ugh.

[wyip]

Not sure if this will help you with your kernelcache issues, but this works for me... I saw a post suggesting to copy the kernelcache from a 10.9 netinstall image into your netboot set. Here's the discussion: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/macenterprise/bqZuM5GnMD0/3ayqeNdPwdIJ

[bentoms]

Hi all,

If you're still having issues with this, please can you try AutoCasperNBI https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/discussion.html?id=11356

I wrote it to help with issues like this.