Hi,
We are just working on getting our NetBoot/SUS on a Redhat VM ready for prime time.
In my initial testing it's taking twice as long to NetBoot a test machine from the NetBoot/SUS server compared to our Xserve with NetBoot (the existing NetBoot Server). The Xserve however is using NFS whilst the NetBoot/SUS is using HTTP to give access to the rest of the NBI after the booter loads. When I say twice as long I mean from start of the machine to desktop loaded on the client machine. That time is around 6 minutes compared with 3 minutes.
Unfortunately the old machine is behaving flaky if I switch it to http so I can't easily make the comparison of both using http.
The NBI I am using is diskless and the shadow file etc is hosted from the AFP share on each server (not a RAMdisk).
I tried comparing network speeds/conditions by timing a large file transfer to each server (actually the complete NBI) using rsync and I get very similar times sending it to each machine - about 30 minutes for 15.2GB. Because of that I'm thinking the difference in times for the NetBoot boot times is more related to the server software in some way.
Does anyone have thoughts on what things can be tweaked to improve that NetBoot image boot time on the NetBoot/SUS?
Regards,
David
