Questions about Netboot

Are you using JUST the netboot server to image the machines (i.e.: image resides on the netboot server and gets pushed from the netboot server, or netboot launches casper imaging and the images/packages come from the casper server)?

If the former, upgrade it with two 1Gbps NICs and gang them together, make sure your other network infrastructure is gigabit, and if possible, separate from production.

If the latter, you might want to consider adding a 2nd 1Gbps NIC in the casper server and yet again ganging those for max throughput (in addition to the other things I mentioned above).

Nicholas,

I image a similar way to what you are trying to do. Our network is mostly 100Mb at the moment, so what we've done is set up a Mac Mini on a 1Gb switch in our technology rooms to act as a netboot and distribution point. We use a 16 port switch so we're able to image 14 at a time(lose one port for the Mini, one more for the uplink to the rest of the network).

I'm not totally sure what's up with your NetBoot. Double-check your NetBoot settings in Server Admin and make sure your AFP connection limit for diskless netboot is high enough and make sure you don't have any filters set that may prevent clients from netbooting. Is your netboot Mini plugged into the same switch as your computers being imaged or is it running over your network's trunk? Ideally you'd want them all plugged into the same device or in a VLAN with less traffic. Have you tried holding down the option key to see your boot options instead of just holding the N key? It may take an extra second but we've come to prefer that rather than the N Key just so we know for sure the first time we touch the computers that it's really netbooting. If nothing shows up but the Macintosh HD, you may have a cable or network issue. If it just takes far too long to load, something between your computers and the mini may not be gigabit or you have a rather severe network congestion problem somewhere.

Also you mention, "Once it gets into the netboot it launches the JAMF software and starts imaging from the Casper server." If the server running the main Casper install does not have a gigabit path to your computers being imaged, this is not ideal and your gigabit link to the mini is being wasted. I would suggest either getting that server gigabit as acdesigntech said, or turn your Mac Mini into a distribution point. We use the distribution point method here at two buildings and it works great. That's the difference between our imaging taking a little over an hour instead of ten hours. You'll definitely want to get that Gigabit speed whichever way you get it done if you are imaging 30 at a time.

Hope that helps. There's probably better advice out there but this is the way I've thrown together in our couple of years of using Casper. :)

That's good advice. Your server setup sounds similar to my initial setup a while back. However, we were on a gig switch (bonded ethernet our of a Mac Pro) we imaged 50 units at a time with 20-ish gig images in about 6 minuets start to finish. I do have two Mac Pro's now with big stripped SAS drives in them, but that won't make much of a difference on the netboot side. Have you taken a look at the logs on your netboot server? Are machines connecting and being rejected or what? Also what version of Mac server are you running? You really should be able to get up to that 40 or 50 mark even off a Mac mini via 100MBps. it might be slow but you should still be able to do it.