Q: Netrestore of 10.11.4 and 10.11.5 FAIL

HI,

this is a very weird problem, I created a 10.11.6 NetRestore Image, made in a 10.11.6 Mac to be deployed on a 10.11.6 Mac, and still the problem persist. (to see if this works finally after 1000 test with the 10.11.4 and 10.11.5 updates)

It doesn't matter how much you try it always end on the Apple logo going until the middle, take some more minutes and then crash hopeless, you go to the logs on the Server and there is no offer passing, Discovery and Request and some AKC and that's it... logs do not give more information about the error, It will be good if you add something like "Unable to contact the Computer", "Client is running a old version please update" or "Please add the server in the bootable list on the computer".

I can blame Apple and his new System Integrity Protection. even If you add the server with the csrutil netboot command this is not functional and is creating problems for everybody, good feature by the way... is like the Administrator password request is not enough security after all.

I will try to disable csrutil and see if this works.

You can't upgrade from a previous install. You have to clean install 10.11.6. Upgrade installs don't update the recovery partition, and that's where the problem exists.

I had the issue. I created a 10.11.3 image and that worked. I noticed the new 10.11.3 image had no "restrictions" and the old failing 10.11.6 had "restrictions" because I had excluded XServe from the hardware that could use the image. I removed the "restrictions" from the 10.11.6 image and now it works.

This has definitely not been fixed with 10.11.6. NetRestore works flawlessly on our white MacBooks and 2008/2009 iMacs. With out 2015 13" MacBook Pros this has been a disaster. I'm only able to image 2-3 MBPs per hour. Most of the time, NetBoot hangs. When I see "Dispatcher: servermgr_dirserv plugin disconnected" in the console, I know it's failed. I shutdown the computer, disable-re-enable the NetInstall service on our Mac Pro server, and start the MBP holding down the option key.

This happens with the 30 Yosemite MBPs we used during the last year as well as 10 fresh, never-been-turned-on refurbished MBPs that just arrived. All 40 of our MBPs are the 13" March 2015 model. The image was created using two of the MBPs that were upgraded to 10.11.6 from 10.10.5.

This is the only active NetRestore image on our server. It's set as the default image, served over NFS and has no restrictions set. I'm connecting the MBP with an Apple Thunderbolt ethernet adapter.

This happens whether or not I choose our wifi network when choosing the NetRestore image as the startup volume.

This setup worked very well last year when I used NetRestore to install Yosemite (10.10.5)

When NetRestore does work on our MBPs, it's really fast.

I'm so incensed with Apple. I've been working on the same computer for the last hour to try to NetRestore. This is delaying our rollout to our students. I'm fed up. It should not be this difficult. I long for the days of Snow Leopard. That was a **** good OS.

Please re-read my reply dated July 28th.

If that's the case (and I'm not doubting you that it is), then why does NetRestore work flawlessly with the 2009 white MacBooks and 2008/2009 iMacs, but only works intermittently on the 13" MBPs?

Sorry, you're asking about the nature of the bug, or the fix, which I don't know the answer to.