Another year, another macOS release & another update to AutoCasperNBI & AutoImagrNBI.

Details of the updates can be found below, as well as the sadness.

Good News Everyone!

Below are the updates, changes & bullets dodged.

APFS?

With High Sierra comes APFS, & that we thought might kill off NetBoot Image creation.

Well, nope! The only change is that you need to be running 10.13+ to properly read an APFS OS.dmg to create a NetBoot Image from.

If you try AutoCasperNBI & AutoImagrNBI on an OS older than 10.13 to read a APFS OS.dmg, you’ll see the below:

HFS is dead, long live HFS!

Again, nope!

NetBoot Images are still HFS, in fact all that AutoCasperNBI & AutoImagrNBI does is mount the OS.dmg & copies the contents over ditto to a sparse image.

Sounds horrible? Well, this is largely copying what Apple do with SIU, & it works.

The Updates

Insert unimaginative lists…

AutoCasperNBI Updates

• ‘New to Mac?’ appears in top-right. – #92
• Unidentified developer error in 1.3.4 – #96
• System Preference “Keyboard” missing when “Reduce Image Size” is selected – #101
• APFS Volume support – #103
• Jamf Imaging 10.0 – #104 by TinyAtJamf was closed 12 days ago
• Generate XPC Cache – #105
• Cannot build 10.13 APFS NBI on older OS’s – #106
• Add Jamf Imaging.app to Dock – #107

AutoImagrNBI Updates

• Validation on file:/// paths – #40
• CodeSigning issue – #41
• APFS Volume support – #42
• System Preference “Keyboard” missing when “Reduce Image Size” is selected – #43
• ‘New to Mac?’ appears in top-right – #44
• Generate XPC Cache – #45
• Cannot build 10.13 APFS NBI on older OS’s – #46

The sadness…

Sadly, in testing macOS High Sierra in relation to NetBoot.. 3 bugs have appeared.

8-9 Minute Boot Times

Over the past couple to macOS releases, boot time for the NetBoot Image has increased.. but macOS High Sierra brings us 8-9 minute boot times.

Lovely,

This is all after the rc.netboot has run, so seems to be purely on the OS level.

My report on this can be found here.

Auto Login Sometimes Fails

This was a real head scratcher, but it seems that when a macOS High Sierra NetBoot Image is served over HTTP. Auto Login fails:

But.. same NBI served over NFS works.

Well, not too bad right? See the next issue.

My report on this can be found here.

NetInstall Service NFS on High Sierra

Trying to boot an macOS High Sierra NetBoot Image hosted via the NetInstall Service from Server.app 5.4 (17S1207) on macOS High Sierra will fail to boot if being served over NFS.

So, HTTP is back.. NFS fails.. spent a weekend chasing my tail with these two issue hampering me.

My report on this can be found here.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to the following for helping me test this release on Slack:
eholtam, jkeller13, mks007, poxonus, tiny_at_jamf, trademarkable, typeusernamehere

And to those of you using these apps 🙂

The respective apps auto-update mechanisms will be setup shortly.