NetBooting from OS X Leopard Server 10.5.4

I spent the better part of my day battling our new Leopard Server installation trying to get NetBoot working. It should have been as easy as creating a NetInstall set with Mike Bomich’s software, however, turns out there’s some funky graphics driver included in X.5.4 that causes net-booted PowerPC machines to kernel panic on startup... Well that won’t do. After lots of Googling, these threads looked promising, and for some admins’ issues, they may very well solve the problem:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=7698665
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=7240134
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=7803336
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=7515103

Careful in that last one - if you delete your /etc/bootpd.plist file (like I did several times), it also mysteriously deletes your DCHP subnets... all of them... so if you had 10 configured... gone. And it turns DHCP off, which, if you’re NetBooting from your DHCP server, means all of a sudden you can’t NetBoot at all, because your client can’t get an IP address. Arg.


It was finally this thread’s solution that worked for me. Recreating kext files, who’d’a thunk?

http://forums.bombich.com/viewtopic.php?t=12079


kextcache -a ppc -m locationofnbifolder/ppc/mach.macosx.mkext -N -L /Volumes/Netinstall-Restore/System/Library/Extensions/