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Level 1

27 points

Netrestore of 10.11.4 and 10.11.5 FAIL

I've been using with success for quite some years netrestore to deploy our macs.

Ever since I upgraded the master image and the server to 10.11.4 the process fails. Experience teaches that usually this gets noticed and fixed. Alas 10.11.5 still has the identical same problem.

I can still deploy the 10.11.3 based image (but well it's a PITA to have to manually do all the upgrades every time).

Setup:

Mac OS X 10.11.5 + Server.app on mac mini server (tried multiple servers, even one on a clean install.

Netrestore image create with system image utility on and off of a 10.11.3 machine hooked up via thunderbolt in target disk mode: continues to work as it used to do
Netrestore image created exactly the same way on and off of a 10.11.4 or 10.11.5 machine: can't get it to work.

Clients tried: multiple MBP's ranging from a brand new machine to a 5 year old machine. All yield the same: progress bar under the apple logo goes to 70/80% and that's it.

Since the 10.11.5 server can still serve the 10.11.3 created image, it doesn't look like it's the server side, it looks like system image utility needs a fix.

If you are REALLY patient (multiple hours), it seems the machines just crash: hard power off is the only thing they respond to anymore - black display.

So the question:

Anybody got netstore of 10.11.5 based images working ? What did you do to work around the issue ?

It's going to be really bad as soon as Apple rolls out new hardware that might have a custom build or something like that before they fix this.

OS X El Capitan (10.11.5), System Image Utility - netrestore

Posted on May 26, 2016 8:32 AM

21 replies

Jul 28, 2016 7:55 AM in response to Ajmaq

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.

alrx

Level 1

4 points

Aug 5, 2016 3:59 PM in response to sss666

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.

gsa-tech

Level 1

4 points

Aug 30, 2016 8:27 AM in response to sss666

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.

Aug 30, 2016 9:23 AM in response to gsa-tech

Please re-read my reply dated July 28th.

Aug 30, 2016 9:38 AM in response to Brian Nesse

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?

Aug 31, 2016 8:23 AM in response to erthquake

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

Netrestore of 10.11.4 and 10.11.5 FAIL