Client systems don’t have to have drives. Nor should they, in certain circumstances. Therefore, diskless NetBoot has been a part of OS X since the early beginnings. And it’s great provided you have the Server Admin application handy. But if you want to enable/control diskless NetBoot without Server Admin then you’re going to need to use the command line.
Each of your NetBoot images will be stored in an array, which can be seen by running the serveradmin command, along with the settings option and then the net boot service, as follows:
serveradmin settings netboot
Locate the netBootImagesRecordsArray, which shows the images that are served up on the server. Find the appropriate one (most people tend to only have one) and then make sure that the SupportsDiskless option is set to yes.
serveradmin settings netboot:netBootImagesRecordsArray:_array_index:0:SupportsDiskless = yes
You can also set DisabledSystemIdentifiers, EnabledSystemIdentifiers, Type (type of file share), pathToImage, Architecture and use IsEnabled to enable and disable images programatically. This allows administrators to programmatically control NetBoot and therefore build custom imaging workflows that, for example, update the NetBoot set for NetRestore at the time of generating the NetRestore NetBoot set. It would also come in handy if any of these features were ever removed from the GUI…
